Wistful thinking: Mr Wilder & Me, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

Mr Wilder & Me is not in any way a state- of-the-nation novel — and thank goodness. Brilliant as Jonathan Coe’s last work, Middle England, was, I’m not sure I could stomach a fictional barometer of pandemic Britain. Coe’s new book is instead a comfortingly nostalgic coming-of-age novel, or rather, a coming-of-old-age novel, probing the twilight years of a Hollywood great.

Billy Wilder is predominantly famous for his work in the Golden Age of Hollywood, when post-war studios had plenty of cash to splash on the Oscar-winning comedies and noirs Wilder wrote and directed, including Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot and The Apartment. Here, though, we meet him not in his heyday but in the 1970s, through the eyes of the young, wide-eyed narrator Calista, on the Greek set of one of his less successful films, Fedora, about an ageing movie star.

Calista, a twentysomething Anglo-Greek musician, whose life is a ‘blur of just-about-tolerable boredom’ and who (a little implausibly) becomes the director’s translator after meeting him through friends in LA, treats him with an almost maternal gaze. She translates inane questions about his old movies from journalists on Corfu. ‘I just remember starting, for the first time, to feel a little sorry for him.’

Coe funnels his own wry humour through Wilder’s dialogue. Wilder cuts a tragic yet amusing figure, put out to pasture by the studios and worried about the new generation of film-makers, ‘the kids with beards’ such as Scorsese and Spielberg.

This is how they think, these people. We made one hundred million dollars with this shark, we need bigger sharks, we need more dangerous sharks. My idea was for a picture called Jaws in Venice… I pitched it to a guy at Universal as a joke.