Hudson Valley Bookshelf
Undercover “Chick-lit”?
by Rachel Cavell

Review of Hotel No Tell by Daphne Uviller. Bantam, April 2011, 288 pages $15 paperback, $9.99 eBook

Zephyr Zuckerman, junior detective with the New York City Special Investigations Commission, is Harriet the Spy meets Phillip Marlowe meets Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday—a wise-cracking, sassy, precocious junior detective with a gift for gab and an aversion to all things maternal. An unlikely private dick who graduated from an Upper East Side prep school, owns a “post break-up” Holland Lop Bunny named after the radical atheist Christopher Hitchens as well as three pairs of Levis in various stages of déshabille, Zephyr poses as a concierge to find a $100,000 deficit in the books of an iconic family-owned hotel in Greenwich Village.

As Zephyr’s undercover odyssey unfolds we are introduced to a menagerie of the eccentric figures in her life—a brother with a penchant for superannuated ex-madams who drags her to experimental theater or “obligation art”; a cursed friend with a no-frills wedding business, No Divas, whose brides meet freakish, random deaths shortly after their nuptials (one mowed down by the Italian prime minister’s alternate weekend mistress while waiting for a hazelnut gelato; another impaled by a stalactite while speelunking in New Mexico); and an otherwise guileless fellow hotel employee named Asa who spends his work time making prank complaints to such companies as Clinique or the makers of Oreos, dental floss, and panty liners in the hopes of getting free stuff from them. “The cereal bars were disgusting. But what did you think of the bath oils? Asa asked earnestly, his face furrowed in concentration, the Plato of perks.”

Our heroine is premised loosely on the book’s author, Daphne Uviller, who, like Zephyr, moonlighted for a time as the superintendent in her parents’ Greenwich Village building. Anyone with the merest Gotham street cred will all but smell the chestnuts roasting from the corner vendor and hear the seagulls’ plaintiff cries as Zephyr rides the windy deck of the Staten Island ferry with her eccentric boss, sips bottomless cups of “roasting plant” coffee at the Leroy Street dog run, and cadges passes for some hotel guests at the Brooklyn Academic of Music’s Next Wave festival.

Behind this clever, utterly appealing and witty book lies a dilemma providing genuine pain—and most decidedly not concerning the matter for which Zephyr has been hired undercover, which in the end has all the heartache and espionage of an episode of Seinfeld gone amuck. Zephyr is about to turn 31, and her aversion to the prospect of motherhood threatens to alienate her from her parents and the one man she clearly loves. But while Zephyr is loquacious and articulate, Ms. Uviller is mystifyingly elusive when considering this, the emotional grist of the book—as if she doesn’t want to trouble her readership with thinking too hard.

Accepting her assignment from her boss, Commissioner Pippa Flatland, evocatively described as “a sinewy, laconic British ex-pat” with a “penchant for polka-dot linen dresses, and a heart that had never fully taken leave of the cool breezes of the Lake District,” Zephyr intones ominously: “never imagining that embezzlement, forgery, and mail fraud indictments would be the least of the McKenzie Family’s problems and merely the beginning” of hers. Is this remark tongue-in-cheek? Is the exaggerated “duh duh duh” of suspense at the end our own cynicism at work, or intended by the author?

Daphne Uviller has something to say, and most clearly the gift to say it. But in the end it is she that is undercover, not Zephyr. By shying away from the real subject of interest—by concealing her own voice in favor of the voice of her sassy heroine—Uviller is susceptible to dismissal as a purveyor of “chick lit” or “feminist lite.” We all deserve more than that.

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