Hesper Anderson MacDougal Street Ghosts

MacDougal Street Ghosts

Hesper Anderson

Simon & Schuster, Sep 2005, $23.00

ISBN: 074322924X

In her fifties, successful Hollywood screenwriter Callie Hyde Epstein is leaving her home in Studio City to a writer's village in the Northern California woods. As she packs, Callie thinks back to the years here as a single mom raising three children, all having left the nest. Still the shocker is the buried box of home movies from her married times in the late 1960s in Greenwich Village.

Callie starts to watch the movies, which focus on her then spouse Irwin and their three children, as they lived in one of the townhouses that aligned MacDougal Gardens. Her children and others played together while their parents flirted with one another, until a bored and tired Callie turned to neighbor Sam Messenger for lessons of an adult nature. Tired of Irwin the ad exec, she dumps him for Sam, but finds nothing to further foster inner harmony except mother's little helper pills prescribed by a string of uninvolved psychiatrists. That is until she takes the three kids to L.A.

Callie is an interesting lead character whose metamorphosis from stay at home having affair motherhood to confident employed single mom, makes for a fine historical tale as the heroine looks back to the defining moments that changed her life. This gives the tale an autobiographical feel, as fans see 1960's lower Manhattan mostly through Callie's prism. However, that also leads to the key other two characters in the triangular relationship that changes her seemingly one dimensional, as the audience never gets to understand what motivates either Irwin or Sam. Still MACDOUGAL STREET GHOSTS is a solid character study that fans will enjoy reading.

Harriet Klausner