The Dakota Winters

I picked up The Dakota Winters, by Tom Barbash, because it has John Lennon as a character, which interested me. And, indeed, there is a section of the book that details his sailing adventure to Bermuda, where he would then lay down some of the tracks for his last album. But the rest of the book is kind of thin gruel, one of those books about a young person coming to grips with who they are and who they want to be, and these books tend to be solipsistic.

Anton Winters has just returned from Africa. He was in the Peace Corps and got malaria. He is the son of a talk show host who one night walked off his show (he's a bit of a combination of Jack Paar and Dick Cavett). The family lives in the Dakota, the famous apartment building on the Upper West Side. The year is 1980, so John and Yoko Ono are residents and friends. Of course, knowing that it is 1980 we know where this is all headed.

Anton narrates, and he's kind of stuck being his father's assistant, and to a certain extent, an extension of him. The father, Buddy, is looking to get back on television, and Anton works to accomplish that. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of side trips, such as to the winter Olympics in Lake Placid, the U.S. Open tennis tournament, and a political rally for Ted Kennedy.

I appreciated the story of The Dakota Winters. Anton is only a few years older than me, and though I have no idea what it's like to live in the Dakota or be the son of a famous man, being that age in roughly that time period did resonate some with me. I just wish Barbash hadn't loaded his book with so many details. It's as if he were bending over backwards to prove to us he either was alive in 1980 or at least did his research. He describes hockey games during the Olympics in excruciating detail, going so far as to tell us who the best player on the Norwegian team was. When he and his brother go to the movies, we are told it is The Fog, a not particularly memorable film. He tells us what people are wearing and what they ate. A typical sentence is "We had bombay martinis and fried shrimp." Well, who cares?

The descriptions of what it was like to live in the Dakota are more relevant. I liked this line: "Then there was Rosemary’s Baby, which did for the Dakota what Jaws did for the ocean." Anton ends up taking a room on the ninth floor, rooms that were once used for servants and mistresses. In a foreboding foreshadow, he describes the Lennon fans who hang out in front of the building every day.

The book also is full of real names. "This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously." Boy is that sentence important, because in addition to Lennon, real people pop up with regularity, ranging from Joan Kennedy to Larry Holmes to Peter O'Toole. It felt like name-dropping, and it made me want to smack Anton in the mouth.

The style of the book is very conversational and without much filigree, which is nice, but I just wish it had been more interesting. Frankly, I didn't care much about Anton. The book jumped up from two stars to three with a lovely last chapter, which looks at Lennon's death from long ago, rather than in real time.