Book Review: Dream Girl

Synopsis:

In the end, has anyone really led a blameless life?

Injured in a freak fall, novelist Gerry Andersen is confined to a hospital bed in his glamorous high-rise Baltimore apartment, completely dependent on two women he barely knows: his incurious young assistant, and a dull, slow-witted night nurse.

Late one night, the telephone rings. The caller claims to be the “real” Aubrey, the alluring title character from his most successful novel, Dream Girl.

But there is no real Aubrey. She’s a figment born of a writer’s imagination, despite wild theories, speculation, and assertions from many who claim to know. Could the cryptic caller be one of his three ex-wives playing a vindictive trick after all these years? Or is she Margot, the embittered ex-girlfriend who keeps trying to insinuate her way back into Gerry’s life?

And why does no one believe that the call even happened?

Isolated from the world, drowsy from medication, Gerry slips between reality and a dreamlike state in which he is haunted by his own past: his faithless father, his devoted mother; the women who loved him, the women he loved.

Now Aubrey is threatening to visit him, suggesting she is owed something. Is the threat real or is it a sign of dementia? Which scenario would he prefer?

Gerry has never been so alone, so confused – and so terrified.

Review:

Laura Lippman is the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of twelve volumes featuring private investigator Tess Monaghan, as well as twelve previous stand-alone novels. She says she drew inspiration for Dream Girl when she observed the isolation trope in horror fiction, especially Stephen King’s Misery, and the theme of isolation explored in works like the film A Quiet Place. “I’ve always wanted to write something horror-tinged . . . in a city where you can see people and people maybe can see you. And where you have your phone and the electricity works, and you’re still so isolated because I felt that people were more isolated than they knew,” she relates. Dream Girl, which fits into several genres, including mystery and horror, is the book she wanted to write about “what goes on inside a writer’s mind” and “someone who is trapped and isolated even though there are a lot of people nearby.”

Dream Girl opens with author Gerry Andersen moving from New York City to his new $1.75 million high-rise apartment in Baltimore. It’s “a topsy-turvy affair — living room on the second floor, bedrooms below” connected by a floating staircase. The building is called the Vue at Locust Point, with twelfth-story views of the harbor that divides the city. His literary agent of forty years, Thiru Vignarajah, is impressed with the industrial-looking space, but not the fact that it is not in New York City. Gerry moved to be close to his ailing mother, who wanted to die in her home, where Gerry grew up. Sadly, she died three days after escrow closed but before Gerry actually relocated. Now Gerry plans to stay for a couple of years before returning to New York in order to avoid losing money on the resale.

There comes a moment in life when everything is the road not taken, when it’s just fork after fork after fork.

Although Gerry has successfully written during prior difficult periods in his life, he hasn’t written a word in months. He rebuffs Thiru’s urging to pen a memoir and will not accept an advance on a book he still hasn’t drafted. He’s fearful that he can’t write anymore and worried that, like his mother, his mind might ultimately be ravaged by dementia.

Divorced three times, he has recently broken things off with Margot, the woman who managed to ingratiate herself into his life and apartment back in New York. He’s fairly certain she will move on to another man who can support her in the manner she has come to enjoy, and will not be interested in traveling to Baltimore for a visit. If she does, he will assure her that his new apartment has no guest room — just a pullout sofa bed in his study.

Gerry’s most successful novel was Dream Girl, centered around a girl who lives on Fait Avenue in Baltimore. It “changed his life” and “launched a thousand guessing games about his inspiration, endless wonderment about how a man like Gerry had uncannily channeled this woman.” The characters were fifteen years apart in age, and Gerry describes the story as “enchanting young woman seduces a slightly older man.” He has always maintained that the character of Aubrey and story were purely products of his imagination. “I stole a moment and created a life,” he says.

But before Thiru leaves, he hands Gerry a letter with a vaguely familiar return address: Fait Avenue. As Gerry thinks more about it and starts to retrieve the letter to study it, he trips over the rowing machine, loses his balance on the floating staircase, and lands in a broken heap at the bottom. There he remains until the following morning when his assistant, Victoria, arrives. Soon Gerry finds himself confined to his bed, cared for by Victoria and a night nurse named Aileen. He finds her slow and dumb. She has no interest in books or literature, and plans to pass the hours Gerry spends sleeping in his study, knitting and using her iPad.

Soon Gerry begins receiving calls in the night from a woman who claims to be Aubrey. But that can’t be possible, because Aubrey never existed. Aileen seems never to hear the telephone ring and there is no evidence of incoming calls in the call history. Gerry, medicated and completely incapacitated, begins to wonder if he is losing his mind or, as he feared, succumbing to dementia. Perhaps someone is trying to drive him insane. But why? Lippman says she wanted to explore a character who can’t decide if he is being gaslit, losing his mind, or addicted to pain killers. “How do you sort out why you’re seeing and hearing things that other people say aren’t there. And if you have to choose one of those scenarios, which one are you going to choose?” Through Gerry’s inner dialogue, Lippman conveys his confusion and panic believably and effectively, ratcheting up the story’s tension and keepers readings guessing along with Gerry.

Gerry recalls his life — his childhood in Baltimore with a mother who made up stories and a father who was a pathological liar, his three marriages, his writing career, the time he spent teaching a graduate-level writing course, and his ill-fated quasi-relationship with Margot who arrives hurling accusations and threats. His memories, related through flashbacks interspersed with Lippman’s third-person narration describing current events from his point of view, provide context and insight into who Gerry is . . . and who his enemies are.

One morning he awakes to find a dead body next to his bed. “If I write a book, a body is going to drop. I kill people. It’s what I do for a living,” Lippman says. Gerry is suddenly not only debilitated and completely dependent on Victoria and Aileen, but utterly terrified. Could he have committed murder and not remember doing it, either because of the pain medication he has been taking or because he was in some sort of dream-state? And why is Aileen, a “cheerful Lady Macbeth, humming as she works,” so insistent that they not involve the police and willing to help him by eradicating all evidence of a crime.

Gerry is a largely unlikable, self-obsessed cad who, trapped, isolated from everyone but his caregivers, and totally at their mercy, wracks his brain in an effort to figure out who might be trying to gaslight him and frame him for murder. And why. There are plenty of people he has had fractious relationships with over the years, including the various women he been involved with romantically and professionally. There are those three ex-wives, of course. And most of his students were women whose work he gave short shrift, instead focusing his attention on the writing of his male students and two “distractingly beautiful” female pupils. At one point, he even attempts to enlist the help of Tess Monaghan, who refuses the job, telling Gerry that for a man sixty-one years old, he’s “not very self-aware” and she can’t help a client who “is lying to himself” about the number of potential enemies he might have.

Dream Girl is witty and frequently hilarious, replete with references to pop culture. It is a deftly-plotted homage, as noted, to Misery and readers cannot be faulted for picturing Kathy Bates portraying the not-so-dim-witted Aileen. Lippman compellingly portrays the narcissism and misogyny that have brought Gerry to his current predicament, and the book is also a wry commentary on men like Gerry who never seem to really see the women in their lives. “Unbeautiful women have never interested him very much” and late in life he gradually begins to realize just how unobservant and dismissive he has been. Is it too late for Gerry to learn from his past mistakes and become a better man?

Lippman keeps the book moving at a fast pace with surprising plot developments. She provides a shocking and ingenious final twist that she acknowledges is “straight-up stolen in a sense” from A Novel Called Heritage by Margaret Mitchell Dukore. And completely satisfying.