The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis

Dutton, 304 pages, $26

“The Dollhouse” is not a country girl goes to New York City and makes good kind of story. It’s a country girl goes to New York City and finds an alternative way of living kind of story. And it’s a good one.

The reader gets two stories for the price of one. In the contemporary story, Rose Lewin was dumped by a major television network as a journalist. She now works in New York City for a startup with a boy-man ten years younger than she for a boss. The intent of her web-based news organization is to produce in-depth, well-written stories, à la old-time journalism, only with high-tech visuals. Rose is working for a fraction of her previous salary but is satisfied. She lives with her boyfriend, a handsome, well-to-do, well-placed city politico, and is hoping for an imminent proposal for a relationship of a permanent nature. Things are looking good.

When everything goes south, as it must in fictionland, Rose becomes interested in a resident of the Barbizon, once the famous Barbizon Hotel for Women and now a condominium. The mysterious old woman, Darcy McLaughlin, has a story to tell, and Rose is determined to unearth it. While the Barbizon had its famous (Sylvia Plath, most notably) inhabitants, it also was known for some infamous events. A maid at the hotel, Esme Castillo, fell to her death right around the time Darcy was a resident. But Darcy is proving elusive and reclusive, so Rose does a lot of research on her own to find out what happened to Esme.

Rose’s contemporary story alternates with Darcy’s story set in 1952. When young women needed a safe place to stay in the big city, they were situated in the Barbizon Hotel for Women. Darcy has come — at great expense to her mother — to learn to be a secretary, get a good job and, by her mother’s unexpressed hope, to find a husband. Darcy finds she has another agenda. Through her friendship with Esme, she is introduced to the world of jazz, usually played in seedy, smoky clubs.

As an old woman living in the converted Barbizon, Darcy wears a heavy veil and shuns interactions with the persistent Rose. In a convoluted, contrived manner, Rose manages to discover some personal things about Darcy, giving a sinister and romantic air to Darcy’s story. Fiona Davis does a good job toggling between the two stories, validating and amplifying the contemporary research with the story set in 1952.

While insisting that the heroines, Darcy and Rose, are independent women who don’t need men, Davis crafts a story full of romance and men happening along at the “right” time. Otherwise, the women in the story are determined and become stronger as the story goes along.

I really enjoyed the book, but there was one element of the story that made me shake my head. It requires a strong SPOILER ALERT, so

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If Rose thought Darcy was really Esme, wouldn’t she have been able to tell because Esme would still have had a pretty strong accent? It’s very hard to shake all vestiges of an accent. Just asking.