Novelist Tom Barbash drops famous names, including Lennon’s, in ‘Dakota Winters’
Tom Barbash is an awardwinning novelist who teaches writing at Oakland’s California College of the Arts, often cautioning his students: “Think carefully about where you want to be for the next few years of your life in your fictional world. That’s where you’ll be spending all your time, so you might as well enjoy it.”
For his latest novel, “The Dakota Winters” (Ecco, $26.99, 336 pages), Barbash took his own advice, settling in for a good stay — figuratively, of course — at The Dakota, the real-life, historic, exclusive apartment building in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, long home to the famous and well-heeled (think Boris Karloff, Joe Namath, Lauren Bacall, Rudolf Nureyev, John Lennon, Yoko Ono).
Having grown up just blocks from the mysterious Dakota with its looming haunted-house gables and dormer windows (it was used as the backdrop in “Rosemary’s Baby,” and it’s where Lennon was murdered in 1980), Barbash was eager to explore the realm, imagining the celebs’ tony parties but also their everyday interactions. What was it like to know one of The Beatles as merely the guy down the hall?
To do that, Barbash, the Marin-based author of the award-winning “The Last Good Chance,” moved the fictional Winters family into The Dakota. Buddy Winters is a famous, sophisticated late-night talk show host, à la Dick Cavett. But unlike Cavett, Buddy has imploded on-air in a nervous breakdown and yearns for a comeback. He’s always “on,” testing out jokes even over the dinner table. His eldest son, Anton, is just home from a Peace Corps stint and a near-death bout with malaria. While recovering, he finds himself swept up in his father’s mission to revive his career, but Anton also wants to forge his own path.
The book spans the Tom Barbash’s new novel is “The Dakota Winters,” based on the Manhattan apartment building where several celebrities lived and where John Lennon was killed in 1980.
months from late 1979 through 1980, leading up to Lennon’s death. Along the way, Anton helps out on the foundering political campaign of his mom’s friend’s husband — oh yeah, it’s Teddy Kennedy. He gets a job as a busboy at the Park Tavern (Anton, not Kennedy), hits the nightclubs, has a romance and somehow gets involved in a whale of a seagoing voyage with Lennon and … more on that in a sec.
It’s a rollicking good time to rub vicarious imaginary elbows with all the celebrities in the book and explore that transformative year. And Barbash had a great time “living” there.
“All the backstage showbusiness stuff, the celebrity thing — I think people are really getting a kick out of that aspect, and I did, too,” Barbash said in a recent interview. “It really ended up
being immersive for me, the fun of getting out of 2018 and jumping into another time.”
Part of that fun came from reliving his own history. He grew up in New York in the ’70s and remembers much of life back then, even what movies were playing in theaters, what bands were in the clubs. For research, “I was spending nearly every day there, almost as if I was really physically there when I was writing it,” he said. “I had access to The New York Times archive, so I’d scour the pages every day — kind of like Buddy and his family would have done, going through the paper and having discussions on current events so Buddy could work them into his routine.”
Indeed, the book is a rich cultural snapshot of the world, with references