The Restoration of Otto Laird

September 15, 2015
When an aging architect, once a genius in his field, travels back to London in an effort to save one of his 1960s apartment buildings from demolition, he's in for an overdue emotional makeover. "The journey of my life hasn't yet reached its terminus, even if the buffet car has closed. I just need to feel that I'm doing more than marking time." So speaks the eponymous hero of Packer's first novel, a story sometimes lightly voiced yet suffused with regret and a creeping sense of mortality. As it opens, Otto, 79, a Holocaust survivor now in poor health and retired to a glorious Swiss villa of his own devising, is fading into a life of memory and reverie. But a magazine article announcing the planned destruction of Marlowe House, a peak of Otto's and his late wife Cynthia's achievement, revitalizes his sense of purpose. Soon he's returning to England to appear in a television documentary intended to help save the building. This journey into the past becomes Otto's opportunity to review his life, both personal and professional, which Packer lays out via extended flashbacks and letters. The tone is sincere, sometimes poignant, yet the psychology is comparatively shallow: Otto's rifts with Cynthia and estranged son Daniel seem to turn on trivial or unlikely behaviors, explained in part by Otto's wartime suffering. As the filming proceeds and Otto revisits old haunts, a mood of lugubriousness intensifies, and Otto's brilliant career takes on the decaying, doomed feel of Marlowe House itself. Restoration is imminent, however-a cozy business of loose ends tied and rifts mended, in keeping with the novel's simple, sometimes-sentimental objectives. A sympathetic story unevenly told.

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Starred review from October 15, 2015
Otto Laird is an accomplished architect living out his golden years in a secluded Swiss villa. Otto takes pleasure in the simple things, but in his advancing age, simple pleasures may be all he has left. A surprising opportunity presents itself when a documentary about the deteriorating conditions of Otto's most famous London building, Marlowe House, is proposed. Otto agrees to appear in the documentary and very quickly finds himself back in London, staring up at the graffiti-covered, weather-beaten exterior of his once-flawless creation. While the documentary focuses on the degradation of Marlowe House and its residents, Otto is mentally transported back to happier times in London and much darker times in Antwerp. As Otto confronts his history, mortality, and professional legacy, a short trip to London turns into a journey he never expected. Packer weaves together the strands of Otto's life with a narrative dexterity rarely seen in first novels, splicing in written letters and flashbacks. Densely layered, Packer's novel explores the importance of introspection, the durability of memory, and the conflict between man-made order and natural chaos. Readers who enjoy the work of Francine Prose and Charles Belfoure will adore Packer's haunting and poignant novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)