Novel set in New York (The Golden Era of Gatsby)

16th May 2013

Melting the Snow on Hester Street by Daisy Waugh, novel set in New York and Hollywood.

The book absolutely brings the era of early 20th Century America to life, the era of the Great Gatsby and the polarisation of wealth, the seamy side of the garment district in New York, the burgeoning wealth of Hollywood.. essentially two very different ends of the spectrum.

The main storyline is cradled at the beginning and end by scenes in which Marion (the paramour of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst) is discussing with Charlie (Chaplin, of course) the context of a letter she has received from someone not known to her personally. This is Santa Monica of the late 1920s. Enter Max and Eleanor Beecham, married couple, and waning stars of the silver screen who find themselves at the heart of the social whirl that is Hollywood…. Valentino, Garbo, Kennedy and more glamour chararcters pepper the plot as it moves back and forth in time, from Hollywood back to New York; a period when times were truly hard for the immigrants, the so-called green horns, who were arriving daily from Europe in search of work.

The early part of the story is based on a true event in 1911 and it vividly portrays the struggle of the people living around the Hester Street of the title, both before and after that event. The people have uprooted themselves from Europe, settled into their new surroundings and taken up the threads of a new life – and though the reader may want to learn more about their personal motivations for leaving everything behind, nothing is revealed. This echoes the new-found rootlessness of the immigrants who can only afford to look forward, and never yearn for what was. Like them, the reader has to confront the here and now, the past is blank.

This book bowls along and superbly brings the feel of the Roaring Twenties to life, both its peachy glamour, and its tawdry poverty, and makes for an absorbing read.

The structure of the book – for example when Eleanor (or Eleana as she is by then known) tells her story to a private investigator – can, at times feel a little contrived, a device to inform the reader of the backstory, nevertheless the story itself is grippingly told. And the ending doesn’t come together so well… would someone write to a famous person out of the blue, based on a vague premise, and then actually get a response? Hard to tell.

A small number of typos and errors in our copy of Melting the Snow on Hester Street were an unwelcome distraction.

Love the era? Let us suggest further books that will delight and mesmerise:

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