The "Mr. Wilder" of this novel's title is Austria-born Hollywood director Billy Wilder (1906-2002), who was behind such cinema gold as Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Apartment (1960). The "me" of the title is 57-year-old narrator Calista, a London film composer. The enchanting Mr. Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe (What a Carve Up!; Middle England) lays out the connection between the two characters: the novel is Calista's account of how a Billy Wilder movie dramatically changed her life.
In 1976, Calista Frangopoulou, age 21, is backpacking across the U.S. and winds up at a Beverly Hills restaurant with Wilder and his screenwriting collaborator, Iz Diamond (1920-1988). Calista, unfamiliar with their work, learns from the table talk that the men are stuck on the script for a film called Fedora, which centers on a reclusive movie star living on a Greek island. Back home in Athens the following year, Calista receives a call from Fedora's Greek production office. And "three days later I was on a plane to Corfu" to become the movie set's translator.
Mr. Wilder and Me is a frame story in which Coe gives Calista a present-day narrative arc, but readers will be itching to return to the Fedora set, where Wilder holds court and Diamond laments to Calista about his and Wilder's waning power: "Our last big hit was fourteen years ago." The novel is a gauzy, glittery and wistful paean to two of Old Hollywood's brightest bulbs as well as a disarmingly frank look at the way status can unjustly diminish with age. Unfortunately, that's showbiz. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer