Outstanding ... 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.
You don’t have to be a film buff to love acclaimed British author Jonathan Coe’s at once melancholic and laugh-out-loud funny novel Mr. Wilder and Me. But don’t be surprised if reading it inspires you to binge-watch Hollywood movie classics written and directed by cinema great Billy Wilder (1906-2002) ... The 'me' of the title is first-person narrator Calista Frangopoulou, whose fictional life story Coe nimbly intertwines with Wilder’s real-life history. Theirs is not a romantic love story, but something more tender and rare: a charming, ironic fairy tale about an accidental, intergenerational friendship that, even as it changes the entire trajectory of young Calista’s future will also help the aging Wilder accept his own limitations ... [a] gem of a novel.
Begins on familiar terrain ... All suggest another satire of arty, upper-middle-class English life. But the novel that follows turns out to be sweeter and less embarrassed by sentiment. It also ventures much further afield ... Coe positions Calista cleverly to contrast her with the two Hollywood big shots at the heart of her 'memoir' ... But in spite of the finely calibrated plausibility of her contact with fame, Coe isn’t really aiming at modest realism here. Some of the dialogue feels straightforwardly informational ... All of these games allow for a certain amount of meta-reflection on the nature of art — writing and filmmaking — and the way that even great artists have to come to terms with their diminishing relevance ... In its own quiet way, the novel is as odd as the movie it describes: part Hollywood biopic, part Holocaust memoir, part middle-class domestic drama. What holds it together is the hard kernel of historical fact at its core.
Coe buries cross-references to earlier works by himself...and others, not impeding the progress or pleasure of readers who miss them, but adding another level for those in the know ... A darker mood intrudes with the Nazi ghosts of Wilder’s homeland. The presentation of that material in the form of a 50-page fantasy screenplay makes this generally light and simple novel the most formally experimental of Coe’s later books. Stylistically, though, the prose is unusually relaxed about word repetitions ... Coe may have been restricted here by using largely real-life characters, whose vivid plausibility is a great achievement. Wilder, charismatically wise-cracking but haunted by history, and Diamond, agonised by the lengthy complexity of turning words into pictures, give the book the feel of a real movie memoir.
Jonathan Coe’s new novel is sheer delight – well, a bittersweet delight with a dark and horrible background ... Brilliant and daring ... Everything works beautifully. Wilder and Diamond and their wives are restored to life ... The last line of Some Like It Hot: 'nobody’s perfect.' Well, that’s true of life but not always of art. That movie is perfect and the same may be said of others Wilder made with a bit of help from Diamond. So too is this lovely, bittersweet novel perfect.
More subdued than some of his earlier fiction, particularly in its examination of late style ... Much of Coe’s book is set in the 1970s. The Wilder that Coe gives us is painfully aware that his Mitteleuropean light comedy, with its touches of elegance and ennui, is now seen as old-fashioned ... By the end of his novel, Coe elegantly brings together Calista’s and Wilder’s worlds ... These impulses to give to one another, whether in everyday acts of kindness or in those of transcendent creativity, are not so different, Coe suggests. In this way, he collapses his habitual divisions, reuniting mortals with the gods of art.
Coe’s new book is...a comfortingly nostalgic coming-of-age novel, or rather, a coming-of-old-age novel, probing the twilight years of a Hollywood great ... Coe funnels his own wry humour through Wilder’s dialogue. Wilder cuts a tragic yet amusing figure ... The book’s easy affection for Wilder is a lovely thing. Even as Coe mocks his subjects it is always with warmth, not derision. It is natural for things to change, and yet still sad when they do. This is a charming, bittersweet book, and a perfect reminder of art’s value in stark times.
The Billy Wilder of Jonathan Coe’s imagination is an old school gentleman, with a deliciously wicked side and a caustic wit. He is also a true film maker ... The book has a similar mix of pathos and silliness as the movies of the man who inspired it. There is a sadness as these former Hollywood titans confront their irrelevance in a new age, but also much joy as they find new ways to cause trouble ... A brisk 240 pages does not feel like enough time in that world of charming Golden Age rascals.
Jonathan Coe has written weightier books than this coming-of-age story meets movie-buff elegy. He’s certainly written longer ones ... That, though, suits both his subject and his tone ... Coe mixes fabrication and film scholarship with his customary wit ... Along the way we get first love, film gossip and film theory galore and the restrained humour of the hard-to-impress Diamond ... So Mr Wilder & Me doesn’t lack resonance, yet stays light on its feet. The whole book feels like some marvellous party where you ricochet from one good conversation to another. A wish-fulfilment fantasy laced with a sure sense that no dog’s day goes on for ever.
Following up a success is never easy and yet the life and light that flooded Middle England is preserved and multiplied in Mr Wilder & Me. This is a book that looks back to Coe’s brilliant early period, engaging...with cinema in a formal as well as a thematic way, delivering the reader a satisfyingly sweeping novel that still manages to push the form in new directions ... One of the most strangely moving pieces of writing I’ve read in years. Coe’s best novels always sounded tricksier in summary than they were when you read them. The same can be said here ... This is as good as anything he’s written – a novel to cherish.
... 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 ... he 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.
Calista...is a lightly-sketched character. Despite her centrality in the story, her private life is portrayed with...suggestive evasiveness ... While this technique can work effectively and humorously on film, and is appropriate for a suspense-driven novel, it does not work here ... There is a slight possibility that Calista’s limp characterisation is deliberate: like most female characters in Wilder’s oeuvre, she fails the Bechdel test. Such a tricksy intertextual tribute may please Wilder’s fans, but not Coe’s ... Coe’s usual cohort of fans will otherwise be bemused by the inconsistent style and tone of Mr Wilder & Me, much as contemporary audiences and critics were bemused by the ill-fated Fedora.
Nimbly avoids all the common pitfalls ... You needn’t be a Wilder fan, or even particularly knowledgeable about film, to find this novel moving and funny.
Jonathan Coe’s admiration of Wilder certainly inspired the novel, and the material seems diligently researched ... Coe has won many literary awards so previous titles might be better choices.
The novel is an affectionate portrait of Wilder—and long-time collaborator Diamond—with Coe weaving some actual Wilder quotes and anecdotes into the story. Ingénue Calista is narratively useful in this regard, presenting herself in her full youthful ignorance and learning about film and Wilder as she goes along ... Mr. Wilder and Me does make for a good read—though, like any fiction closely based on a real-life figure, fact and fiction can be in some tension ... There's a lot here that is very good, from insights into Wilder and his background to depicting the changing world (and films) of the 1970s, but...Mr. Wilder and Me (intentionally?) has a[n]...awkward feel. But at least Coe embraces the comic potential fully and doesn't get all serious, which certainly helps.
Coe’s book isn’t so concerned with capturing a side of Hollywood or the process of moviemaking as it is with summing up a life and a fading era ... Beautifully written and filled with compassion, humor and an abundance of knowledge about old Hollywood, Mr. Wilder and Me sheds light on lives that aren’t perfect but still well lived.
A witty elegy for the last gasp of old Hollywood ... A lengthy flashback to Wilder’s life as a German émigré is affectingly rendered in screenplay format. Coe’s fictionalized account of the real-life filming of Fedora...is filled with hilarious anecdotes and some hard-won wisdom. As Wilder embarks on what will turn out to be his penultimate picture, Coe brings great sympathy to his touching depiction of an older artist fighting to remain relevant. Coe’s fans will fall for this one.
There is so much to enjoy about this book, which is rooted in extensive research about Wilder's life and the making of Fedora, including the recollections of someone who actually lived a version of this experience—and yet it reads like a fairy tale ... Beautifully written and full of wisdom, this unusual and fascinating book contains many treats, including a miniscreenplay done in Wilder's style and an unforgettable scene in which Calista and Billy sample Brie de Meaux on a French farm where it is made. If you love novels set in the world of moviemaking, this is as good as the best of them.
