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Summary
Summary
"Take a dollop of Alfred Hitchcock, a dollop of Patricia Highsmith, throw in some Great Gatsby flourishes, and the result is Rindell's debut, a pitch-black comedy about a police stenographer accused of murder in 1920s Manhattan.... A deliciously addictive, cinematically influenced page-turner, both comic and provocative." -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review
For fans of The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Great Gatsby comes one of the most memorable unreliable narrators in years.
Rose Baker seals men's fates. With a few strokes of the keys that sit before her, she can send a person away for life in prison. A typist in a New York City Police Department precinct, Rose is like a high priestess. Confessions are her job. It is 1923, and while she may hear every detail about shootings, knifings, and murders, as soon as she leaves the interrogation room she is once again the weaker sex, best suited for filing and making coffee.
This is a new era for women, and New York is a confusing place for Rose. Gone are the Victorian standards of what is acceptable. All around her women bob their hair, they smoke, they go to speakeasies. Yet prudish Rose is stuck in the fading light of yesteryear, searching for the nurturing companionship that eluded her childhood. When glamorous Odalie, a new girl, joins the typing pool, despite her best intentions Rose falls under Odalie's spell. As the two women navigate between the sparkling underworld of speakeasies by night and their work at the station by day, Rose is drawn fully into Odalie's high-stakes world. And soon her fascination with Odalie turns into an obsession from which she may never recover.
Author Notes
Suzanne Rindell is a doctoral student in American modernist literature at Rice University. The Other Typist is her first novel. She lives in New York City and is currently working on a second novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rose Baker is inexperienced and unworldly. She takes and types criminal confessions of every sordid kind for a New York City police precinct, but her life is otherwise unremarkable. Due to the increase of crime resulting from prohibition (the book is set in 1923), a new typist is hired to help with the workload, and Rose is intrigued. Odalie is beautiful, provocative, and more than a little unscrupulous. Rose gets swept into Odalie's world of fashion trends and speakeasies, and finds it exhilarating. As she relates her growing involvement with Odalie, Rose becomes as uncertain of Odalie's motives as she is infatuated. Gretchen Mol is effective in narrating Rindell's novel. She sounds young, reserved, and thoughtful. And the voices Mol-who turns in an earnest and capable performance-lends the other characters are appropriate. An Amy Einhorn/Putnam hardcover. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
New York, 1924. Rose Baker is a plain, prudish young typist in a scuzzy police precinct on the Lower East Side. An orphan raised by nuns, she is tolerated for her efficiency rather than liked. Which suits Rose fine, because she doesn't like many people - not her colleagues in the typing pool and certainly not the "affected" Helen, with whom she shares a room in a drab boarding house. But then a new typist arrives: exotic, immaculately dressed Odalie, her bob a glossy helmet of polished enamel; her breezy, alluring manner giving rise to all sorts of rumours. Is she a failed actor? A gangster's plant seeking "the lowdown on the bootlegging racket"? The men love her, naturally. "Damned nice girl," says the lieutenant detective. Rose affects lofty detachment, but can't deny Odalie's impact. The woman was, she concedes, "the dark epicentre of something we didn't quite understand yet, the place where hot and cold mixed dangerously". (This sort of observation - dramatic yet vague - is typical of Rose. Or is it typical of Suzanne Rindell?) Mutual suspicion yields to an all-consuming friendship when Odalie turns the full beam of her attention on Rose. Suddenly the pair are inseparable, and we learn that Rose has been in this situation before: she left the nunnery in disgrace after becoming "entangled" with a young novice. Odalie educates Rose in decadence, taking her to speakeasies where drunk flappers play the piano with their feet. She even suggests Rose move into the swanky hotel suite Odalie calls home - an offer Rose is thrilled to accept. By this point Rose's unreliability as a narrator is clear; as is the fact that Bad Things are going to happen. Not only are we seeing Odalie through the prism of her obsession, but Rose is writing her account in an asylum under the supervision of a psychiatrist who believes that "telling things in their accurate sequence is good for healing the mind". The problem is, Rose can't do linearity. She tends towards egoistic impressionism, a habit Rindell has fun with in a scene where Odalie introduces Rose to her arty friends, only for Rose to be appalled by their love of The Waste Land: "If I recall correctly, the poet was called Eliot Something-Or-Another and the poem itself was all a bunch of jibberish, the ravings of an utter lunatic." British publication of The Other Typist has been timed to exploit Gatsby mania, and Odalie is certainly a wily gatecrasher of a gilded milieu. In fact, the similarities are superficial. Rindell is more interested in evoking Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, with its rambling narrator, copious foreshadowing and tormented concern with the fluid nature of identity. Indeed, Rindell pays explicit homage in an epilogue which, like the end of The Good Soldier, features the use of a suddenly produced penknife. The Other Typist is clever, addictive entertainment. Plotted with panache, it alludes playfully to genre bedfellows such as The Talented Mr Ripley and Notes on a Scandal without being obvious. Yes, Rindell's prose can be ungainly and prolix, but I think that's deliberate: Rose's prose would be ungainly and prolix. It's likely that Rindell, a New Yorker studying for an Eng Lit PhD, is familiar with Ford's advice to would-be novelists: "You will seek to exasperate so that you may better enchant . . . You will give passages of dullness, so that your bright effects may seem more bright." There are places where The Other Typist doesn't quite cohere, but for all its flaws it knows how to enchant. To order The Other Typist for pounds 10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - John O'Connell The men love her, naturally. "Damned nice girl," says the lieutenant detective. [Rose] affects lofty detachment, but can't deny [Odalie]'s impact. The woman was, she concedes, "the dark epicentre of something we didn't quite understand yet, the place where hot and cold mixed dangerously". (This sort of observation - dramatic yet vague - is typical of Rose. Or is it typical of Suzanne Rindell?) By this point Rose's unreliability as a narrator is clear; as is the fact that Bad Things are going to happen. Not only are we seeing Odalie through the prism of her obsession, but Rose is writing her account in an asylum under the supervision of a psychiatrist who believes that "telling things in their accurate sequence is good for healing the mind". The problem is, Rose can't do linearity. She tends towards egoistic impressionism, a habit Rindell has fun with in a scene where Odalie introduces Rose to her arty friends, only for Rose to be appalled by their love of The Waste Land: "If I recall correctly, the poet was called Eliot Something-Or-Another and the poem itself was all a bunch of jibberish, the ravings of an utter lunatic." - John O'Connell.
Kirkus Review
Take a dollop of Alfred Hitchcock, a dollop of Patricia Highsmith, throw in some Great Gatsby flourishes, and the result is Rindell's debut, a pitch-black comedy about a police stenographer accused of murder in 1920s Manhattan. Typing criminals' confessions, Rose admires the precinct's conservative, mustachioed middle-aged sergeant while she is critical of his superior, the lieutenant detective Frank, who is closer to her in age and a clean-shaven dandy in his white spats. An orphan raised by nuns, Rose lives in a boardinghouse and leads a prim spinster life far removed from the flappers and increasingly liberated women of the "Roaring Twenties." She seems destined to a life of routine solitude until a new typist is hired. Odalie wears her hair bobbed, dresses with panache and lives in a posh hotel. Rose voices disapproval at first, but she is clearly drawn to Odalie, even obsessed with her. When Odalie invites her to share her hotel rooms, Rose moves right in. Soon, Rose is accompanying Odalie on her adventures, which include bootlegging, among other vices. Sometimes Rose borrows Odalie's clothes, sometimes she runs errands for Odalie. But who is Odalie? Where does her money come from? And if she has money, why does she work as a police stenographer? At a house party on Long Island, a young man from Newport thinks he recognizes Odalie as the debutante once engaged to his cousin, but she denies knowing him. By the time he turns up dead, Rose has been sucked into Odalie's world so deeply that their identities have merged. Who is using whom? Recalling her recent life, revealing only what she wants to reveal in bits and pieces, Rose begins her narration archly with off-putting curlicues she gradually discards. She is tart, judgmental, self-righteous and self-justifying. She is also viciously astute. Whether she's telling the truth is another matter. A deliciously addictive, cinematically influenced page-turner, both comic and provocative, about the nature of guilt and innocence within the context of social class in a rapidly changing culture.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Rose, a police precinct typist in Prohibition New York, has seen many things. As the recorder of confessions and transgressions of all sorts, she considers herself to be an astute judge of character. So when Odalie Lazare, a new typist, arrives in the office, Rose is intrigued by her beauty, charm, and seeming wealth. Rose becomes infatuated with Odalie, who is not what she appears to be, as Odalie pulls Rose into a world filled with speakeasies, bootleggers, and elite estate parties. With hints toward The Great Gatsby, Rindell's novel aspires to re-create Prohibition-era New York City, both its opulence and its squalid underbelly. She captures it quite well, while at the same time spinning a delicate and suspenseful narrative about false friendship, obsession, and life for single women in New York during Prohibition.--Paulson, Heather Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In this crisp psychological thriller, debut novelist Rindell transports listeners to 1920s New York City during the height of Prohibition. Rose, a stenographer at a Lower East Side police department, excels at her job, taking great pride in her typing skills and work ethic. The conservative, somewhat prudish Rose, who was raised at a Catholic orphanage, becomes fascinated with the new typist, the glamorous Odalie, a charismatic woman with stylish clothes and bobbed hair who would have been right at home at one of Gatsby's parties. As Rose and Odalie strike up a friendship and venture into the dangerous underworld of the speakeasies, Rose struggles to reconcile her job with her new social life. Gretchen Mol, who appears on HBO's 1920s-set series Boardwalk Empire, delivers the perfect pacing and tone for this menacing thriller. VERDICT Highly recommended for all suspense fans. ["Fans of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley are sure to love Rindell's debut novel, which parallels Ripley in its examination of our fascination with wealth and the potential consequences of keeping the wrong company," read the review of the Putnam hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 5/3/13.-Ed.]-Beth -Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
