The Dakota Winters

The Dakota Winters is a story of the residents of the famous Dakota building in New York. This of course was the very spot where John Lennon and Yoko lived and where he ultimately died in a tragic shooting.Anton Winter is the narrator of the story and it’s through his eyes we see events leading up to the day of the shooting. He is the son of Buddy Winter who was a famous talk show host and who is now attempting a come back. For a man now surrounded by fame and fortune, he and his family feel the loss of not being part of the scene. Anton is back from a tour in the Peace Corps where he contracted malaria and so is resting. He however soon gets involved in his father’s comeback.The Winters love the fact that their building is famous – Rosemary’s Baby was filmed there – and there are many references to films and famous inhabitants of the building. There’s a real sense of the music in the films, music and many cafes and clubs referenced throughout. The characters live and breathe the city so much that it comes to life from the page. The reader, living in the present day, knows all too well what is about to happen.This is not just a story about John Lennon or the Dakota however. This is also a story about how fame and fortune can corrupt. Anton is constantly moaning about his status and his family’s position despite living in the most luxurious building in the city and having wealth and privilege others can only dream of. It does show that fame and fortune are not everything and that a gilded cage is still a cage.The story of Anton and his father was supposed to be the central plot to the book I think, but it was more the Dakota’s story and John Lennon which appealed to me. The father- son relationship goes through many twists and turns and roles are reversed when Anton has to be the one to help his father through his dark times. Anton is behind the comeback and Buddy comes to rely on him more and more. It’s as Anton raises his father up and then leaves him to get on with his own life that the tragedy of the John Lennon shooting occurs.Timing, wrong place wrong time, our place in the world and in our family. How one moment can change everything. The rumbles of the shooting and of that realisation can be felt as you turn the last page.

Mellow and lovely. I found this comforting on the mental health stuff, fascinating on NY celebrities, great on John and Yoko. Really cool. Pitched perfectly. Highly recommended.

“There was an unwritten code in the Dakota that you made nothing of people’s celebrity and you treated everyone simply as neighbours, and for the most part we did.”Not, as you might suppose, a bleak seasonal tale set in the American Midwest but the story of the Winter family living in Manhattan’s fabled Dakota building in the mid-seventies. The Dakota was home to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1979, the year before Lennon was killed, and the inevitable outcome of this appealing novel gives it an interesting edge. Yet at no point does the author overplay his hand; such limited foreshadowing as Tom Barbash allows himself is handled with the utmost subtlety and is more the writer’s reflection of the city’s tense urban scene during that era.Twenty-three year old narrator Anton, has returned home from the Peace Corps in Gabon to recover from a severe bout of malaria. Two years previously, his father Buddy Winter, a popular and well-respected chat-show host, had a meltdown live on television. Buddy is now itching to get back on the box and wants his son to help him but Anton has always felt ambivalent about living life in his father’s shadow. When Dakota neighbour John Lennon asks Anton to teach him how to sail, Anton can see the possibility of another life, and even though he's been brought up surrounded by celebrities, even he feels star-struck. Well, who wouldn’t be?Tom Barbash deftly interweaves his fictional story with true-life luminaries from Leonard Bernstein to Teddy Kennedy and tells this great story about Lauren Bacall on Buddy’s chat-show “as she excoriated Frank Sinatra, who romanced her after Bogart died, and eventually proposed but told her, she said, not to tell anyone. At a black-tie event she told a friend in confidence, who managed to whisper it to Swifty Lazar, who that night wrote about it in the Examiner. She called Sinatra after the story ran, and he told her what was done was done, but they’d have to ‘lay low’ for the time being.‘It’s like you robbed a bank.’‘In his eyes I had.’‘Then what happened?’ Buddy said.‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, he never spoke to me again after that.’ Someone gasped.‘He’ll get his,’ Buddy said. ‘Time wounds all heels.’”Other than Lennon’s voice (which didn’t quite ring true to me) there is so much to admire and enjoy here. Tom Barbash has a remarkably light touch and can bring forth human insights as well as wry humour without ever losing sight of his tender underlying story of a father and a son, as well as the penalties of extreme fame and the rewards that may – or may not – be worth it.My grateful thanks to Simon & Schuster UK for the review copy courtesy of NetGalley.