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1980 worth a revisit in pages of Tom Barbash's The Dakota Winters

Tom Barbash's The Dakota Winters
Tom Barbash's The Dakota Winters

When you read a novel, you're not supposed to think about the author.

Ideally, the story simply exists — how it was conjured isn't important. Usually when your attention is called to a writer's style or you begin to ponder the ratio between the drawn from life and the wholly imagined, it's a bad sign.

But that isn't the case with Tom Barbash's The Dakota Winters (Ecco, $26.99), a charming and ultimately poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man living in New York's famous Dakota apartments — the backdrop for Rosemary's Baby and where the likes of Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland and Joe Namath lived — in the freighted year of 1980. If you know anything about one of the Dakota's most famous residents, John Lennon, you will probably be able to guess where Barbash's novel is heading early on — probably before you crack the cover. But we know how every story ends; that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the journey.

Anton Winters is the son of intellectually nimble television talk show host Buddy Winters, a Dick Cavett type who elevated the chat show to an art form only to break down on camera and stamp off — Jack Paar style — on a two-week search for transcendence. (Pointedly, the reference point here is the 1946 film version of Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, and not the Bill Murray version which came out in 1984, and which, before I looked it up, seemed to be a more likely suspect. But if Barbash indulges any anachronisms in the novel, I didn't find them.)

Buddy is still unemployed when the book opens in January, when 23-year-old Anton has arrived home from the Peace Corps, his stint in Gabon cut short by malaria. He means to get well, help his father find a comeback gig and navigate a place for himself outside his parents' shadow. (His mother, a dear friend of Joan Kennedy, mainly busies herself with Joan's husband Ted's presidential campaign.)

To this end, he takes a job busing tables, sublets a writer's much more modest digs on the Dakota's upper floors, and begins teaching Lennon — a neighbor and family friend — how to sail.

This is where I felt compelled to drill down into Barbash's methods a little. I know just enough about Lennon to know he did become interested in sailing late in his life, and that he did make a 700-mile voyage from Newport, R.I., to Bermuda in the summer of 1980. Barbash writes convincingly about that trip in the book, even including the real-life captain and some other passengers as characters on the trip.

Barbash's Lennon feels real; he wouldn't be too familiar with the pop hits of the day, he pronounces the painter's name "Van Gog."

This weird verisimilitude caused me to wonder about Barbash, whose work I'd previously encountered from his novel The Last Good Chance (2003). I found myself turning to the end of the book acknowledgments, where Barbash reveals that he'd grown up on the Upper West Side, interviewed the captain (Hank Halsted) who accompanied Lennon on his Bermuda voyage and visited the Dakota as well as reading several books. I could deduce that he was about my age — which is to say that in 1980 he was about the same age as Anton.

Then I went on the Internet and read in the online version of Interview where he described his research, which included reading every issue of The New York Times for the period covered in the book. It wasn't magic but it was impressive shoe-leather research.

And it pays off, though perhaps my nostalgia is showing. I miss the adult world I was just about to enter in 1980, I miss the smart talk of Cavett and Tom Snyder, and I want to have watched Buddy Winters' show. Barbash nails the feeling of the pre-digital era before cable exploded: The last days of analog.

The Dakota Winters is maybe too cutely titled, and maybe leans a little too hard on the greatest hits of that year -- the Lake Placid Olympics "Miracle on Ice" makes a cameo, Ted Turner scratches out advice on the back of his business card, Anton dances all night to The Jam, Lorne Michaels is fired from Saturday Night Live, Phil Donahue lends Buddy an empathetic ear in an effort to jump-start his resurgence — but I enjoyed it. It could make a nice movie, though the requisite compression might squeeze down the dynamic range, which is the real strength of this artful novel.

So let's just allow it's probably not for everyone and not a book that will become a touchstone in my life. It's worth reading if you remember the times it chronicles, and maybe it's more worth reading if you're looking for a shortcut to understanding those days, those quaint sad people of the past who raised us and imprinted us with their fears and dreams.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

Style on 02/17/2019

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