Mr Wilder and Me

Jonathon Coe and this reader share many passions, though Coe drips success, and I mostly just drip. Here’s Coe: MA, PhD in literature; musician before a writer; fan of progressive rock; the Duke of Prunes in Javier Marías’s kingdom of Redonda. Mr Wilder and Me is his latest work, and the first Coe novel I have read. Good gifts are like that: just outside your reading preferences but connected to your interests in one way or another. Here we have a young adventurer (Calista) and a real-life film legend, Billy Wilder. There is a Greek island and sharp conversations and gleaned insights into the mind of an aging artist and his urgent need to create, even when the times have changed and success of films like Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity is in the past.

Coe bookends the novel in the near-present with Calista in London, ‘almost sixty’, about to drive one of her daughters to Heathrow (she’s headed to Australia, a crisis point in many an English household and story). Calista has had a moderately successful career as a composer for film, and is married to steady but boring Geoffrey, and wondering what comes next?

(On a side note—when did “Geoffrey” or “Geoff” become a metonym for the ordinary life? Jonathon, for example, would have done just as well!)

A little emotion at the airport sees Ariane ask Calista: ‘Did your mother do this?’ and thus—in Chapter 2—the story of the past begins. In Los Angeles, still a teenager, Calista has a chance meeting with Billy Wilder and a table of Martini-drinking-sophisticates (she has been invited by a friend to a restaurant, wearing t-shirt and denim shorts, rather out of place). Calista’s youthfulness tickles the older crowd, and Wilder and his friend and writer, Mr Diamond, enjoy a fresh audience to relay old anecdotes and present woes of struggles with Hollywood financiers.

The story soon moves to Greece, where Calista lives in Athens with her parents. It is 1973, she is twenty-one, there is a military government and she has returned from her studies in England to teach private lessons at home. Life is “grey and monotonous” but opportunity soon arises: Wilder has remembered her and she is to be employed as a translator on a film set in Corfu. Thus, slowly, she gets to know these Hollywood legends Wilder and Diamond, their working methods, their complex pasts (Wilder fleeing Nazi Germany to Paris, and from there, to L.A.). Calista has her first boyfriend, Matthew, and begins to take her music seriously. The film Wilder is making, Fedora, turns out to be an anti-climax in that the production side is fussy and problematic, and its release generally a failure (one reviewer labelled it an “epitaph”). Coe takes the reader back to Calista in London, reflecting on all that has been, still working on a great musical score inspired by Wilder, still not performed or recorded. Calista’s other daughter, Fran, in the meantime, is struggling with an unwanted pregnancy, an anxiety for Calista to manage and the subject of the story’s end.

I don’t know if Calista deliberately echoes “Clarissa” in Coe’s naming, but there is a similarity in the story to Mrs Dalloway to the extent that it involves a mature woman who looks back over her life, her loves and sacrifices, and still she soldiers forth. Coe is not attempting high modernism, of course, and the story reads easily and fairly faultlessly (I was unsure about the film script elements in the Munich chapter, but there is some thematic sense to Coe’s playfulness here).

So there it is—a book I read and enjoyed. I sense in the craft of the songwriter who puts out another good tune: commercial, it’s true, but with the hooks and grooves of an old-hand doing what he loves. Another Coe success.