Mr Wilder and Me: ‘A love letter to the spirit of cinema’ Guardian Paperback – July 1, 2021

By chance, the book I finished just before I started this book was Conversations with Wilder, Cameron Crowe's book that includes verbatim interviews with Billy Wilder near the end of his life. It is, I was quite surprised to learn, the first book listed in Jonathan Coe's bibliography at the end of the book.I bought this book because I've enjoyed most of Coe's work and he's one of the few novelists working in English today whose books I buy sight unseen. I didn't even read the cover closely enough to realize the "Mr. Wilder" was Billy and not either Thornton or some fictional character name. But I started it just when I finished the Crowe book and was quite delighted to learn that it was indeed about the same director about whose life I had been so fascinated in the lengthy interviews and whose films I have generally enjoyed.But I didn't enjoy the novel. There were two big reasons why.First, it simply felt rushed. None of the contemporary characters other than Calista herself are fleshed out enough for us to care about them. Her husband and her relationship to him is a cipher. One daughter is leaving to go abroad and the other is pregnant and contemplating abortion, but we never learn enough about the circumstances of either. Rather, they just have little signs on their head "cause of empty nest syndrome." The contemporary story frames the flashback stories and just fails as a framing device.Second, the three main voices in the novel are Calista, Billy Wilder and his collaborator I.A.L. ("Izzy") Diamond. Calista is Greek but has been raised speaking England English along with other languages. Diamond was born in what is now Moldova but raised in Brooklyn from childhood. Wilder was born in Austria, moved to Germany and then France before coming to the United States. Yet all three characters seem to speak in the same cadence with the same diction. And here's the thing: the reason, as Wilder himself says in the Crowe book and in numerous other interviews, he always used a collaborator on scripts in English is because he could never get English syntax and diction exactly right. Which is evident to anyone who ever read an interview with the man. When you read the Crowe book, which is done generally in dialogue, you never have to guess who's speaking because Crowe talks like the Californian he is and Wilder talks like the immigrant from Austria he was. When you read Coe's imagined dialogue for him, he sounds just like Calista and just like Diamond.I rather doubt the world needed a novel about the making of Fedora, a film neither Wilder nor Diamond was proud of and which is justly forgotten today. I remember when it came out and I thought it had something to do with a hat (it is the name of a character).Coe was trying, I'm pretty sure, to wrap the story of a film composer (Calista's ultimate profession) at the end of her career reminiscing about meeting Billy Wilder at the end of his career, but we don't learn any lesson that she learned from Wilder that she can use to decide, as she does at the [spoiler alert] end of the novel, that she wants to mother her pregnant daughter's child.Coe has written some insightful and provocative novels about class conflict in Britain over the course of the past half century. This one deserves the same treatment as Fedora.

Watching the January Sixth select committee hearings this summer, this book is a nod to those who don't star in the famous lives, but are there watching. Having realized what diversity Wilder brought to cinema, including a few loser films (and he knew it), this reminds me of what it would be like to watch the famous be famous.Highly recommended.

A tremendous read. I like Coe's work and I am a fan of Wilder so the two coming together has ptovided an entertaining, interesting and at times, humorous novel.

L'ouvrage commandé m'a été livré très vite (un grand merci), et j'ai pu m'y plonger très vite.La belle écriture de Jonathan Coe pour connaître mieux le réalisateur Billy Wilder, son oeuvre et son entourage cinématographiques, ainsi que le contexte historique et son histoire personnelle douloureuse. L'idée géniale d'avoir fait intervenir un personnage à priori extérieur au monde du cinéma que le lecteur découvre en même temps que lui.J'ai eu beaucoup de mal à lâcher le livre.

The story was interesting and believably written. The author likes Brie rather more than I.

I was unfamiliar with Jonathan Coe's writing, and only came across this book as a result of it being discussed on Radio 4 as a suggestion to get Barry Cryer reading novels again (part of a longer discussion about the female bias in novel writing and reading).I found it readable, entertaining and informative about the life and times of the late, great Billy Wilder (about whom I knew virtually nothing other than the titles of his famous films). It was a well constructed novel, with some pace, and largely sympathetic characters. I didn't find the insertion of a fictional multi-lingual Anglo-Greek assistant forced me to overly suspend my disbelief, and Calista's story and that of her her family is interwoven with her youthful role as chosen confidante of the great director.I read it soon after I'd finished "Trio" by William Boyd, which coincidentally had a lot about films and film making in it too, but whereas the characters and situations in that book are clear in my mind, I find I struggled to recall very much about "Mr Wilder and Me", despite reading it very recently. I think I'd put it down as pleasant, but not particularly memorable. The good news is that Barry Cryer really enjoyed it, and read it all. But that I think was a cunning choice by the editors who suggested it - they must have known that he was a terrific fan of Billy Wilder. Whilst reading it, I kept wondering if Barry Cryer was enjoying it and thinking that if I was someone who'd given up reading novels for whatever reason, this book wouldn't reawaken my desire to do so again. I'm not sure I really think it's 4 stars, but 3 does not do it justice, and halves being disallowed, I've upped it to a 4!

Jonathan Coe is one of my favourite authors: The rain before it falls, in particular, probably my favourite book. For those who have read it, I’d say that Calista (the “me” in Mr Wilder and Me) might recall Rosamond, however unfortunately failing to match her depth, intensity and consistency.I think consistency is an issue throughout the book: the bricks it is made of don’t seem to merge in pleasant harmony, the part set in the seventies being far more solid and meaningful than the part set in the present.I’ve liked the portrait of Billy Wilder: it makes you long for watching his movies, and I suppose that’s something Mr Coe would be happy of.