Jonathan Coe’s finest fiction consists of riotous comedies or scalpel-sharp satires about British lives and the state of the nation. The Birmingham-born writer’s 1994 breakthrough novel, The Winshaw Legacy, set during the Thatcher era, charted the lurid excesses and the rapacious exploits of an upper-class family — “the meanest, greediest, cruelest bunch of back-stabbing bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.” His 2013 thriller-farce, Expo 58, explored national identity in the postwar years through characters caught up in “a frenzy of head-scratching and soul-searching around that maddening, elusive topic of ‘Britishness.’”
In his uproarious coming-of-age novel The Rotters’ Club (2001), Coe tracked Benjamin Trotter and his friends at King William’s School (or as one disparaging character has it, “toffs’ academy”) while also tracing the fault-lines within British society in the 1970s. Deeper fractures emerged in The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010), a picaresque romp with bite that revolved around a traveling salesman whose midlife crisis mirrors his country’s provincial decline. In Middle England (2018), Coe depicted a disunited kingdom after the European referendum and presented two characters who are forced to recognize their differences and attend “Post-Brexit counseling.”
Coe’s latest novel, his 13th, constitutes a marked departure from his previous work. Mr. Wilder and Me is a woman’s account of the valuable time she spent working with Billy Wilder on one of his last films during the summer of 1977. Throughout the book, Coe plays things straight: There are no satirical swipes, no gutsy gags, no dissection or evisceration of modern Britain, and no grotesque characters to put down or send up. Dispensing with his stock-in-trade could have proved disastrous. Instead, Coe has worked wonders and produced one of the finest novels of his career.
Calista Frangopoulou is a 57-year-old composer of film music. Brought up in Athens, she now lives in London with her husband and their twin daughters. But Calista’s safe world is imploding. On the home front, one daughter, Ariane, is about to fly the nest for Australia. The other, Francesca, is pregnant and in two minds about keeping the baby. The work front is another source of pain: All too aware that no one has commissioned a score from her for 15 years, Calista is trying to come to terms with the fact that her services are no longer required.
But rather than abandon her craft completely, Calista keeps herself occupied by writing a little suite for chamber orchestra inspired by Wilder. “I adore his films,” she tells a producer. “Doesn’t everybody?” There was a time, though, when Calista had never heard of the legendary Austrian-born director of Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard. When she did find out who he was, she happened to be in his company.
So begins the first of several trips down memory lane. While backpacking in America in 1976 at the age of 21, Calista befriends a fellow lone traveler called Gill. The pair go to a restaurant in Los Angeles where Gill’s father has arranged for his daughter to have dinner with one of his friends. Their dining companions turn out to be Wilder, his screenwriting partner Iz Diamond, and their wives, Audrey and Barbara. Calista’s first impressions don’t match her expectations. Her idea of a Hollywood director is a young, dynamic, baseball-capped American. Instead, she finds a septuagenarian with a German accent who “looked more like a retired university professor, or a Beverley Hills surgeon with a thriving business in expensive facelifts.”
The evening is filled with glitches: The girls feel self-conscious about being underdressed in a glamorous restaurant. The men are glum, as “Marlene” has turned down the offer to play the lead in their new picture. Gill disappears early, leaving Calista out of her depth and out of control. And yet, despite her naivety and her drunken haze, her hosts take to her, particularly when she breaks Wilder’s creative impasse by unwittingly solving his scriptwriting problem.
The following year, Wilder stuns Calista by getting in touch out of the blue and hiring her as an interpreter while on location in Corfu for his latest film, Fedora. On set, she meets, and falls for, Matthew, the son of one of the makeup artists. She also learns from Diamond that his heart isn’t in the project owing to its deadening seriousness. He wants the movie to be funnier. But Wilder has moved on from his zesty comedies. Time will tell whether audiences will move with him.
After Greece, Calista follows the crew to Munich and later Paris for the film’s final scenes. Along the way, her job titles change: She goes from Diamond’s personal assistant (“more that of counselor and therapist,” she says) to screenwriter’s secretary. She strengthens her relationship with Diamond and Wilder but also with their wives. One day, Audrey talks candidly about her husband: “He’s not the King of Hollywood any more, he hasn’t been for quite a while, and that kind of glory is not going to come back again.”
Back in the present day, the older, wiser Calista wonders if Wilder back then was able to grasp what she has only come to realize now, namely that “what we had to give, nobody really wanted any more.” Wilder soldiered on but never recreated his earlier magic. Calista won’t go down that road. Responding to an urgent impulse, she finds a more meaningful pursuit that gives her a renewed sense of purpose and the chance to feel, once again, “that huge, priceless instant of connectedness.”
On a superficial level, Mr. Wilder and Me is a breezy tale about a sunny summer. But Coe’s novel amounts to so much more. The humor is subtler than usual and in short supply, but it is used to great effect in key scenes — one in which Greek journalists put incomprehensible questions to Wilder, another involving a tense exchange between Wilder and Al Pacino over the latter’s insistence on eating American food in a German restaurant. “Maybe reset your clocks to Pacific Daylight Time so that he still feels he’s back at home in Los Angeles,” Wilder tells the waiter.
One section of the book comprises a 50-page film script about Wilder’s early years. It’s a formally daring experiment on Coe’s part, but he pulls it off with aplomb. We follow Wilder as he flees Berlin when Hitler comes to power. Later, in exile in Paris, he ruthlessly dumps his girlfriend to make his name in Hollywood. The screenplay takes its darkest turn in the mid-40s when Wilder trawls harrowing concentration camp footage to make the Holocaust documentary Death Mills. Asked why he studies image upon image of corpses and the living dead, he replies that he is looking for his mother, from whom he hasn’t heard in three years.
This standout section is compelling reading. A gentler but just as mesmerizing scene toward the end of Calista’s story features her visit with Wilder to a French farm to sample locally produced brie. In a lesser writer’s hands, it could have been twee and inconsequential. Coe, however, knows exactly what he is doing. He renders it a lovely late moment of bonding before a parting of ways. Wilder leaves her with words of wisdom: “Whatever else it throws at you,” he says, “life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them.”
Other pleasures Coe serves up are Wilder’s opinions on the new generation of filmmakers — “kids with beards” such as Spielberg, Scorsese — and a selection of other choice lines, many of which, according to the author’s afterword, have been cherry-picked from Wilder interviews and biographies. One of his comments is a bombshell. During a press conference in Munich, Wilder tells a reporter that making Fedora, a film rejected by American studios and so financed by German companies, puts him in a win-win situation. “If it’s a huge success, it’s my revenge on Hollywood,” he says. “If it’s a flop, it’s my revenge on Auschwitz.”
Coe’s novel does two things simultaneously. It chronicles an evocative and formative summer, and it serves up a captivating portrait of an artist. “He’s a mass of contradictions,” says Diamond of Wilder. “I suppose that’s why he needs to tell stories.” Coe tells stories too, and this one is a delight.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
