Review by New York Times Review
TOM BARBASH'S ARRESTING new novel takes place over a year and a half, from August 1979 to December 1980, in the roiling life of its eponymous New York family. The narrator of "The Dakota Winters," the 23year-old middle child, Anton Winter, is so decent and self-denying that we know from the beginning he won't be the hero of his own life. In fact, he has ceded that role to a powerful, secular trinity: his father, Buddy; his home in the famed Upper West Side apartment building, the Dakota; and, most affectingly, his Dakota neighbor John Lennon. In "The Dakota Winters," Barbash has vividly captured the end times feeling of this period in America and has populated his sad and funny tale with a highly engaging mix of real people and fictional characters who take us to its ordained and dreaded finale, Lennon's death. At the time, New York City was crumbling, beset by transit and garbage strikes. Rioters had set Miami on fire. Jimmy Carter had failed to secure the release of the Iran hostages. As Lennon tells Anton: "Best to move slowly right now, Yoko says. It's Mercury Retrograde." The book's engine is conversation, used to great effect. Barbash's characters talk all the time. It isn't that they don't act or think; it's that they act and think out loud - thoughtfully, humorously, movingly. The novel opens with a letter to Anton from Buddy, "a.k.a. Dad," taking center stage as usual. Anton is in Gabon with the Peace Corps, hospitalized after a near-fatal bout of malaria. Buddy, a celebrated talk show host, is recovering from a nervous breakdown that took place on national television in front of millions of viewers. Not one to recover quietly in a yellow room, Buddy reports the public response. "Everyone has his or her theory about what I've been through." Some ask: "Didn't you use to be Buddy Winter?" Phil Donahue calls it Buddy's " 'Razor's Edge' journey." When Anton, still in recovery, returns from Gabon, Buddy, plotting his resurrection, asks him to work as his sidekick and also, it's plain, his alter ego. Anton agrees, sucked in by Buddy's charm and charisma, shining on him after his years in the shadows. Buddy is at his most seductively charming with strangers. In taxis, he sits in the front seat and interviews the drivers, drawing out insights they didn't know they had. Anton thinks of his parents as the husband and wife in the "Thin Man" movies: witty, glamorous and, tellingly (though he doesn't say it), childless. Still, Anton has an interest in reviving Buddy's career. After all, as Buddy's son he gets to live in the Dakota and hang with John Lennon. Lennon was probably the most famous inhabitant of a building that has housed many famous people, including Leonard Bernstein, Rosemary's baby and Boris Karloff, a previous occupant of the Winters' apartment. The building itself is a New York celebrity, with its brooding Gothic front, its water-powered elevators, its tenement-like upper floors occupied by "the Leftovers," the servants and mistresses left behind when their employers moved out. Describing it to a friend, Anton is quick to say it isn't a "snobby place," more like "a European village - in, say, Luxembourg." Anton meets Lennon in the Dakota and teaches him to sail. A friendship grows and Lennon takes his young neighbor on a lifealtering sailing trip to Bermuda. Like everyone else in this novel, they spend a lot of time talking. Barbash has given Lennon a captivating voice, catching his cadences and playfulness, as well as his astuteness. Midway through the novel, Lennon tells Anton he's his father's "sodding Cyrano de Bergerac." Toward the end, as Anton struggles to break from Buddy, Lennon blesses him with a rock baptism: "A year ago you were dying of malaria in a rancid hospital bed. Now look at you. I've sprinkled you with Beatle dust." Barbash has sprinkled "The Dakota Winters" with Beatle dust. Lennon is alive in its pages. SUSAN RIEGER is the author, most recently, of "The Heirs."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The punning title of Barbash's fleet-footed novel is a key to the wit propelling this brain-whirring tale of the pitiless spotlight of fame, hard-won comebacks, and father-son dynamics. The Dakota depicted here is not a western state but, rather, the legendary New York City apartment building, home to such stars as Lauren Bacall and Boris Karloff, and, in Barbash's imaginative variation, the quick-witted Winter family. Buddy Winter was a beloved TV talk-show host until he went to pieces on the air. Anton Winter, the elder of Buddy's two sons, narrates with Salingeresque concision and ruefulness. Back home in late 1979, after a Peace Corps stint and a grim bout with malaria, Anton is drawn into his father's quest for a new show. As he reluctantly considers how much Buddy relies on him and offers delectable behind-the-scenes talk-show revelations, Anton also becomes an agent for creative renewal for their friend and neighbor John Lennon. Drolly observant, Anton describes the Lennon fans swarming the Dakota, the Lake Placid Winter Olympics, his astute mother's part in Ted Kennedy's presidential campaign, the simultaneous rise of crime and gentrification, a wild sea adventure with John, and Lennon's tragic murder. Punctuated by clever dialogue and crisp social critiques, Barbash's incisive, funny, and poignant portrait of talented people and a city in flux illuminates the risks of celebrity and the struggle to become one's true self.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Barbash's spirited latest revolves around a family that lives in the Dakota, the Upper West Side apartment building where Rosemary's Baby was set and outside of which John Lennon was assassinated. Here, in 1980, 23-year-old Anton Winter is just back from a stint with the Peace Corps in Africa, where he contracted malaria. While recovering, he works for Teddy Kennedy's presidential campaign (Anton's mother is friends with Teddy's wife); goes sailing with his neighbor, John Lennon; gets a job as a busboy at a restaurant in Central Park; romances an English journalist; and-most importantly-helps his father, Buddy Winter, a famous TV talk show host (think Dick Cavett) who had a nervous breakdown two years ago and walked off his show, attempt a comeback. Barbash (The Last Good Chance) seamlessly mixes real-life celebrities into his fictitious narrative. All the backstage show business details ring true, as do the author's exhaustingly encyclopedic cultural references for 1980. Though the central relationship between Anton and his father barely strikes any sparks, the book is packed with diverting anecdotes and a beguiling cast, making for an immensely entertaining novel. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In fall 1979, 23-year-old Anton Winter leaves his Peace Corps assignment in Africa to recover from a near-fatal bout of malaria at his family's apartment in the Dakota, also home to John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and a host of other well-connected New Yorkers. Anton's father, Buddy, is on the mend after a spectacular on-air nervous breakdown that deep-sixed his successful nine-year career as a brilliantly funny late-night talk show host. Buddy looks to Anton to help him craft a comeback, relying on Anton's skillful navigation of the entertainment waters even as nervous caution about Buddy's plan dogs network executives and Buddy's wife and other two children. For the next year, Buddy's dependence on Anton intensifies just as his son's restless need to forge his own life is fueled by a near-disastrous sea voyage with Lennon, who is on fire with a renewed creative streak, a fascinating and tragic reminder that his murder is just months away. VERDICT Barbash (The Last Good Chance) has written a beautiful, evocative novel of family devotion, celebrity, downfall, and survival, framed by the political and cultural upheavals of America on the cusp of a new decade. Irresistibly tender. [See Prepub Alert, 6/21/18.]-Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
It's 1980, and a young man is reckoning with his famous father's breakdown with a little help from his New York City neighbor John Lennon.If you know anything about Lennon and 1980, you already know the ending of Barbash's second novel (Stay Up With Me, 2013, etc.). But that knowledge only heightens the bittersweet, nostalgic mood that Barbash ably conjures here; the book is suffused with warm memories of punk clubs, the "Miracle on Ice" U.S. Olympic hockey team, young romance, and the A-list residents at the storied Dakota apartments. The narrator, Anton, is the son of Buddy Winter, a talk show host in the Tom Snyder/Dick Cavett vein who scorched his reputation by having an on-air meltdown and storming off the set. Buddy is considering his options for a comeback (PBS? A big-three network? A newfangled cable channel?), and Anton is eager to assist, though ultimately the novel is concerned with how much we need to escape our parents' shadows. Anton's guide for managing that is Lennon, the fellow Dakota resident and former Beatle with whom he forms an unlikely friendship. Their scenes together provide the novel's most charming moments, as Anton gives Lennon sailing lessons off Cold Spring Harbor and serves as a sounding board as he writes songs in Bermuda. Barbash convincingly imagines Lennon's easy, sardonic humor while he helps the young man learn how to be confident without being star-struck. The downside is that those scenes throw the rest of the narrative a bit off-balance. Anton's siblings and love interests rarely feel like more than casual walk-on roles; Anton's mother, stumping for Ted Kennedy's failed presidential bid, plays only a slightly more substantial one.Pleasurably endearing for anybody with a soft spot for pop culture, Annie Hall-era Manhattan, and 20-somethingdom at its most freewheeling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
