In the Midnight Room

In the Midnight Room, by Laura McBride, Touchstone 2018 

Its a good 400-page read, text plus author interview, a real emotional trigger - four women, all with very different lives, connected through a single Las Vegas nightclub, sixty years of threads woven through and around their new establishment, the Midnight Room.

But what draws the reader in is not just another female friends saga - it's the opening page.   "To celebrate victory in Europe, June Stein dove headfirst off the Haverstraw Bridge."   June Stein, previous inhabitant of Clinton Hill.

Honorata, a beautiful Filipina, coerced into being a mail order bride.

Coral, a successful teacher, adopted into a good and loving family, now facing a friend's troublesome request.

Engracia, an illegal Mexican immigrant maid who buries her loss deep but now faces a problem suitor.

A good subject for book clubs, In the Midnight Room captures the reader as each of the four lives and secrets and decisions made and lost play out.  Set in Las Vegas, the location is one that the author knows well, and even the history and look of the nightclub El Capitan plays a big role in the women's dreams and work.  Their partner decisions - June's choice of Del, for instance - is instructive.  Given the supposed freedom of women now, its not hard to see how some of their sacrifices look unnecessary or flawed, but as McBride shows us, for women, same decisions, more choices, better odds.

What happens to each of these four women as they struggle through building a business, friendships, families becomes the stuff of author McBride's skillful prose.  The suspense of each of their stories resolves, we hope, into quiet redemption.

Finally, the six-page interview with Laura McBride is good insight into a writer's mind, the mechanics of novel conception and execution.  Writing is hard work and after her first work's great success, McBridge proclaims, "There were times when I wondered if I would have the persistence to write another novel, and days when I worried that I had charged into the story without giving it enough consideration in advance.  Looking back, I see those were confidence fears.  In fact, I'm dogged when I want something, and I had considered many possible stories, some at length, before feeling electrified about this one."

"When the novel clicked together in my head - that I would use these characters, that the plot would develop in this particular way - I was just racing to get it on paper.  I couldn't write fast enough or get enough writing time to lay it down while it was all in my mind.  That was the pressure that never left me through the whole writing period:  this thrum of anxiety that I might not have enough time to write it out, or to go back and make of it what I wanted."