RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksOutstanding ... Coe succeeds in bringing life to the complex, charismatic Wilder. He surrounds Wilder with perfectly achieved portraits ... In a sense, Mr Wilder and Me is the novel toward which Coe’s fiction has always been heading ... By focusing on Wilder’s autumnal period of decline, the novel becomes a meditation on age and creativity, on the arc of an artistic career ... Coe expertly weaves together the different strands of the novel ... The novel summons up and reclaims the director’s \'lost\' presence; the endnotes reveal that many of the dialogues reproduce his words verbatim. Coe’s novel continues his conversation with Billy. By bringing back the great director’s wit and humanity, Coe delivers the full fruits of his obsession to us.
