The Magnificent Esme Wells

February 12, 2018
The glamour of pre–WWII Hollywood and the glitz of postwar Las Vegas are the playgrounds of young Esme Wells and her dreamer parents—her small-time crook and unlucky bookie father, and her mother, a movie star wanna-be who never gets past showgirl roles in B-musicals. Sharp’s fourth novel (following The True Memoirs of Little K) is a grimly sad story of big dreams, bad luck, and worse decisions, as Esme and her parents move from Hollywood’s scams and cheesy musicals to the Las Vegas world of casinos, high rollers, suckers, and gangsters. By 1945 Esme’s father works for mobster Bugsy Siegel as the gangster’s vision of a gambling city comes true, exposing young Esme to power, money, greed, and violence. Underage, she works as a casino cigarette girl, where her good looks draw the leering attention of Nate Stein, a ruthless thug who intends to take over all of Las Vegas. After Bugsy is bumped off, Esme falls in with serious mobsters like Stein, Mickey Cohen, and Meyer Lansky, eventually becoming Stein’s teenage mistress and chorus line showgirl, despite her father’s warnings. When Esme discovers her father’s involvement with the less-than-legal dealings, the story builds to a dangerous boil. Sharp’s narrative is a bold and gritty portrayal of unreachable dreams, anchored by its notable depiction of Esme.

February 15, 2018
The daughter of two beautiful losers--a snakebit Jewish gambler and a chorus girl--comes of age in late 1930s Los Angeles and early 1950s Las Vegas.A blonde, blue-eyed child of 6, Esme Silver has not yet been enrolled in school, which doesn't mean she's not getting an education. She spends her days on the MGM lot with her mother and at the track with her father; she's known to the regulars at both places. One of her rituals is to purchase lunch at the track's concession stand for her father and herself, four hot dogs for 40 cents; the counter lady often combs out her hair and washes her face. "I can only imagine what compelled her ministrations, what I must have looked like, hair unbrushed, shirt on backwards, my neck strung with a hundred necklaces in imitation of my mother, a silk flower pinned to my wild coiffure." In one track of this story, 20-year-old Esme recalls the events of 1939 that culminated in her moving with her father to Las Vegas, where he was employed by Ben "Bugsy" Siegel. The second track follows Esme's own career in Vegas, which takes off when she's noticed at age 15 by Nate Stein, an ambitious and ruthless Jewish gangster. Stein is fictional, but many of the characters are real, including cameos by Judy Garland, the Andrews Sisters, and Busby Berkeley. Sharp's (The True Memoirs of Little K, 2010) research shines in her detailed descriptions of the MGM productions Esme's mother plays in and the Vegas extravaganzas that feature Esme herself. "The Stardust's...stage was larger than a basketball court, with an Esther Williams-like swimming tank for summer shows and Sonja Henie-like skating rink for winter ones. The pipes secreted in the catwalks created rain or snow on demand." If you liked Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach, this novel offers a similarly immersive mid-20th-century experience, featuring a heroine as interesting, tough, and tragic as Egan's Anna Kerrigan, with similar Daddy issues and gangland connections.This glittering noirish tragedy, with its lushly imagined period landscape and subtle feminist trajectory, is both fun to read and sad to think about.

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Starred review from February 15, 2018
Ballet's dark side set the stage for Sharp's previous novels, including The True Memoirs of Little K (2010). Here she limelights the conjoined hearts of America's cutthroat entertainment industryHollywood and, at its hot and dusty conception, Las Vegas. Esme Wells, Sharp's winsome narrator, is the child of two renegades dazzled by tinsel and danger. Her beautiful, unstable mother, Dina Wells, born Dorothy Wolfkowitz, is desperately trying to capitalize on her showgirl roles in Busby Berkeley films, while Esme's handsome gambler father, Ike Silver, bonds with powerful Jewish gangsters, including Bugsy Siegel, who is building the first palatial Vegas casino. Pirouetting back to 1939, when she was a pretty little urchin of six getting schooled at racetracks and pawnshops, Esme traces her steps to becoming a jailbait cigarette girl, showgirl, and burlesque star under the protection of a brutal mobster, up to her twenty-first birthday, when her life is hanging by a gold chain. Esme's dramatic and irresistible story sparkles with psychological nuance, sumptuous detail, and vivid historical perceptions as Sharp tracks the high-wattage success and violence of tough Jews building movie and casino empires while Hitler bloodied Europe. With real-life figures, mushroom clouds rising from desert test sites, and arresting insights into the power and vulnerability of a daring woman performer, Sharp's novel, like Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach (2017), is propulsive and profound.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)