Who Are The Main Characters In Last Summer At The Golden Hotel?

Last Summer at the Golden Hotel explores the complicated lives of two families that have run a resort in the Catskills for decades. The two families are joint-owners of the resort and in this novel the families’ children and grandchildren come back to the resort for one last summer before it is sold. The families are introduced through the Goldman family: practical Brian, his free-spirited sister Maddie, their parents Amos and Fanny and then there is the Weingold family: sharp-tongued matriarch Louise and her son Peter who wants to leave the resort to start his own business. But he is held back by family obligations. Louise is trying to keep the peace and keep the family together for one last summer. Her daughter Aimee shows up after being absent for many years. She is a wild child with secrets of her own.

This is more than a novel about these characters. It is a wonderful novel about a family and how people can so oppositely relate to one another and also totally relate to each other. So while Maddie is the idealistic artist to Brian’s realistic lawyer, Peter is haunted by his failures as a father to Aimee’s arrival as a realization of those failures. And there are plenty of secondary characters, too, from the longstanding staff of the hotel, that add so much warmth and history to the novel. The sum of all of these people with all of their flaws is so real that by the end of the book you will feel like you’ve spent a summer bickering on the porch with them.

This book is just filled with personalities! The Goldmans and Weingolds are sort of a sitcom ensemble. There’s Fanny Goldman, the eighty year old grandma of the family, still running the kitchen of the family’s hotel. She yells at the chefs in Yiddish, but is sort of lovable. Her husband, Amos, is sort of low key, but has a lot of great one-liners. And then there’s Louise Weingold, Fanny’s nemesis and friend from a long time ago. Most of their conversations are just sort of snarky and fabulous. And then there’s the younger generation. Brian is sort of trying to hold everyone together. Maddie is a teenager who spends most of her time at the hotel doodling on napkins and dreaming up ways to restore the hotel to its former glory. Peter Weingold, the dad, is in the midst of a midlife crisis. And his daughter Aimee is just sort of a wild card. She shows up at the hotel with her hair dyed bright pink and proceeds to sort of “burn it all down.” Even the guest characters at the hotel have sort of their own arcs, like the bellhop who has been working at the hotel since the 80s. But really, there’s no real main character. Instead it’s sort of like a dysfunctional family having a reunion and you get to see all of their baggage.

Brian Goldman is probably the closest to a protagonist in this piece. He is a lawyer struggling to mediate his family’s arguments over the sale of the family hotel. His sister Maddie is his complete opposite, all dreamy and full of ideas. Amos and Fanny, his parents, are stuck in the past. The Weingolds are equally well drawn: there’s Louise who is constantly rolling her eyes and offering up her smart-alecky comments; Peter who is wallowing in regret; and Aimee who is a sweet, 20-something-year-old Gen Z’er that none of the family saw coming. The hotel is even another character, old and creaky with peeling wallpaper and faded glories. They’re all very selfish and very sentimental and, at the end of the day, they are all very human.