GatesyRead

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