It's always enjoyable reading Coe, a very humane author. Mr. Wilder is atypical of his style (i.e. it is not a satire/state-of-the-nation novel), although film and cinematography has been a constant preoccupation of his, dating to What a Carve Up! As this novel's title might suggest, it is a fictionalised biography of Billie Wilder, producer of “Double Indemnity”, “Some Like It Hot”, and more. The narrator reflects on her brief and accidental encounter with Wilder, helping him during the production of “Fedora”. The action occurs over Los Angeles, Greece, Munich, Paris, and London in the 1970s and provides a great snapshot of the era. However, the broader context for Wilder is to discuss the narrator's coming of age and, more importantly, the inescapability of the Holocaust's legacy. Wilder is an Austrian Jewish refugee, successful and settled in the U.S., but is still (unsurprisingly) drawn to the impact the war had. When Coe writes “as of Wilder” in film script mode during the middle of this work, it arguably reaches its apotheosis.
By Jonathan Coe