Charlie Green is headed for an Ivy League college in Philadelphia. Previously protected by the privilege of his moneyed New York family, the eighteen-year-old craves the freedom and independence of university life and dreams of falling in love with a “light-eyed” barmaid just as soon as he can. His mentor, and guiding light, is his already successful elder brother, John, who has navigated his own way through college education into a high flying Wall Street job with accompanying high-achieving girlfriend. Within days of hitting Philly, Charlie finds himself at the Sansom Street Oyster House where he falls instantly in love with waitress Paula Henderson. True love travels through choppy waters as Charlie pursues the elusive Paula through a fug of alcohol, angry ex-boyfriends and protective parents.

Set in the late 1980s, Daniel Roberts’ BAR MAID is an unashamedly male-centred coming-of-age story has obvious literary antecedents in The Great Gatsby and The Catcher In The Rye. This isn’t to suggest that there is enough about Roberts’ creation of the often annoying, frequently self-absorbed Charlie Green that would lend him the iconic status of Holden Caulfield or Jay Gatsby. Charlie is of a type that is increasingly scarce in contemporary literature and harks back to the literary “Brat Pack” novels of Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, whose early books were being published at the time BAR MAID is set and whose narratives featured similarly disaffected, unapologetically wealthy protagonists.

In a way, this is period fiction of the most precise/authentic kind. Roberts revisits the world of the 80s without any retrospective irony and without filtering the motives or language of his characters through current contemporary values or the more progressive mind set of the 2020s and is an accurate facsimile of a novel from the period. And this is not only down to the referencing of time specific pop culture such as Billy Joel or Rubik’s Cubes (though all such cultural references are unerringly accurate) but extends to the way Roberts’ characters talk and think. Depending on the sensitivity of the reader, these decidedly un-woke attitudes could prove problematic although, in the author’s defense, they are resolutely period perfect. More difficult to excuse, and applicable to many of the writers of the aforementioned “Brat Pack”, are Roberts’ underdeveloped female characters who, at worst, act as nothing more than foils for the witticisms of the male lead character or, at best, as antagonistic props to his indolence and angst. All that said, BAR MAID is a well written debut and Roberts’ experience as a playwright has given him an uncanny ear for sharp, witty and well modulated dialogue. That much of this dialogue is corralled by the retrogressive restrictions the author has placed on his characters is a shame but points to a potentially promising career.

A stylish and occasionally engaging coming-of-age love story, Daniel Roberts’ BAR MAID is a period novel set in the 1980s that is unerringly accurate in both its evocation of an era and of the literary style of the time.

~Kent Lane for IndieReader