A review of Divorce Towers by Ellen Meister

Horny enough to, erh, fornicate her way out of a plum job as matchmaker for wealthy Manhattan bachelors and bachelorettes. And horny enough to endanger her new gig as concierge at Beekman Towers — AKA Divorce Towers, LA’s premier landing spot for libidinous, well-heeled divorcees.

Catering to the Beekman’s congenitally concupiscent is a complicated affair, but two mandates supersede all the rest — don’t play matchmaker, even for her beloved but romantically restless Uncle Arnie, and don’t, above all, get involved with the residents. Both edicts quickly prove problematic.

With respect to the latter, there’s Dante, a high-flying talent agent — drop-dead gorgeous and persistent to the point of creepiness. And tech-nerd Zach, handsome but damaged, fragile but kind. Faced with hunks likes this pair, what’s a healthy girl to do?

Toss in an attention-averse internet celeb, a shy New Englander fleeing an abusive spouse, the theft of a bejeweled faux Fabergé egg, an enigmatic dominatrix, and a gaggle of superannuated, hilariously rapacious divorcees, and you have a combustible mix. Divorce Towers is classic Ellen Meister — fast-paced, breezy, and funny AF.If you’ve liked Meister’s other offerings, you will surely love this one.

And yet.

I read Divorce Towers in the days following Americans’ raising of a convicted sexual abuser to the nation’s highest office, as our new philanderer-in-chief hastened to elevate a distinctly rapey congeries of misfits and misogynists to positions of power. This represents a cultural moment so staggeringly anti-female as to spark interest among some American women in a United States’ version of Korea’s 4B movement — an uncompromising feminist rejection of childbearing and heterosexual dating, sex, and marriage.

I found myself wondering, therefore, if Divorce Towers, with its exuberant, indeed reckless, froth of sex and entanglements is a cultural anachronism, a book fundamentally out of sync with its time. And those considerations brought me, perhaps oddly, to Dashiell Hammett and his characters Nick and Nora Charles from 1934’s The Thin Man.

The Thin Man landed on the nation’s bookshelves (and, in short order, its cinema screens) as Americans remained mired in the depths of the Great Depression. This was the Grapes of Wrath era, and the elegant hijinks of a wealthy heiress and her dissolute, gumshoe husband might easily have been considered afoul of their time.

But audiences didn’t find them so. Indeed, the film’s popularity was such as to engender no fewer than five sequels. Depression-era movie goers might well have found the antics of such a pair of borderline alcoholic, well-heeled layabouts off-putting.

They did not.

“An amiable social comedy” (per Claudia Roth Pierpont in The New Yorker), the film, rogerebert.com notes, is “about personal style. About living life as a kind of artwork.” To those sunk in hardship, the playful, elegant lives of Nick and Nora Charles seemed a salve, a diversion from the dire present, a hope for happier times to come.

It is in this light that I prefer to see Ellen Meister’s latest — as a salve, a diversion, a hope in this dark moment between the genders. And a hope for what, precisely? For a time when, as Leonard Cohen would have it, “baby, we’ll be making love again.” Buy Divorce Towers at your local bookstore or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that donates part of its profits to independent booksellers.