Old Hollywood meets Old New York in The Last Spirits of Manhattan, John A. McDermott's wildly inventive debut novel of ghosts, grudges, and Alfred Hitchcock.
It's February 1956, and Superior, Wisconsin's Carolyn Banks wants more from life than marriage. To escape her boyfriend's imminent proposal, she flees to New York, where she stays with her Aunt Bella and mulls over her future. Meanwhile, Pete Donoff, a copywriter for a Manhattan ad agency, has been tasked with fulfilling a request from a famous client: "It was Mr. Hitchcock's dream to have his cocktail party in a verified haunted house." The house Pete winds up renting belongs to Aunt Bella: it was the residence of her now-deceased aunts. Aunt Bella lets Carolyn have her party invitation but cautions that one of the deceased aunts is "still in the house."
Although McDermott's author's note reports that the party at the novel's center is based on a real-life event, The Last Spirits of Manhattan is a lavish work of imagination. Among the partygoers are Hitchcock's wife, Alma, who routinely dispenses clear-eyed observations; New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams and his possibly duplicitous wife, Barbara; and actor Henry Fonda, who faces off against his late wife--one of several dyspeptic ghosts who crash the party. The novel's roving perspective, shared by most of the above-named human partygoers as well as the ghosts, dilutes the focus of a story that belongs to Carolyn and Pete, whose scenes together nonetheless deliver the fizzy, flirty banter of a golden-age screwball comedy. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer