The Dangerous Age [Hardcover]

Annette Williams Jaffee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1999

The author of two exuberantly praised novels, Annette Williams Jaffee returns with a wise and sensual tale about pursuing the one great passion of our lives, not in our youth, but at that last dangerous moment when everything we own and everyone we love is at risk. The Millers are the envy of all who know them, a 'successful' couple on the verge of the best years of their lives. Suzanne's first book is enjoying national attention while Barry can write his own ticket to teach at any law school in the country. But a spate of recent deaths and the absence of her children, away at college, force Suzanne to confront the fact that her marriage is cold and empty.

When Suzanne meets Robert Parrish, a silver-haired banker from East Texas with a talent for real friendship with a woman and an appetite for sensual pleasure-suppressed for years in his own straight-laced marriage-she must decide between the secure life she chose after the shameful ending of her first, youthful love affair or the disdain of her children, the loss of friends and the financial uncertainty awaiting a woman who uproots her life in pursuit of the true intimacy she has long denied herself. With rare insight, keen social satire and some of the most touchingly rendered erotic scenes in recent memory, The Dangerous Age is above all a story about seizing ecstasy in our livesregardless of age, in spite of the consequences.

"Set aside a block of uninterrupted time to read Jaffee's new novel... Her writing makes the reader feel everything, with the result being that this is a book that refuses to be put down. A touching and absorbing story that lingers long after the final page has been read; highly recommended."-Library Journal (starred review)

"The pages turn themselves."-Los Angeles Times Book Review

"How glorious to give oneself up to a great late-in-life passion."-New York Times Book Review

Annette Williams Jaffee is the author of Adult Education (Leapfrog) and Recent History (Putnam). She lives on the Delaware River in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this short chronicle of midlife crisis and divorce, Jaffee (Recent History) tells what a quarter-century of marriage may do to a woman's love life and her self-esteem. Suzanne Miller, a Chicago feminist scholar and teacher of fairy tales, wakes up one morning with the feeling that "everything she had imagined was completed." Her marriage to a successful law professor and her two grown children provide little comfort. Moreover, several of her friends are divorced or dying, and she herself soon must undergo a hysterectomy. When she meets Robert Parrish?an athletic, older banker with three daughters and a chilly wife?Suzanne leaves her husband and buys a house in the country, which she shares with Robert. Sexual passion provides Suzanne's great awakening; she "becomes a woman." Yet her sudden emancipation feels like a put-on: she calls her boyfriend "Daddy" and lets him order for her in restaurants; he addresses her exclusively as "honey" and "baby," as if he has forgotten her name. Although the prose is careful and precise and Suzanne's predicament well rendered, the protagonist's self-critical yearning for lost childhood grows tedious and fails to give a fresh dimension to this familiar plot.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Set aside a block of uninterrupted time to read Jaffe's new novel, which explores the life of Suzanne Miller, a woman in midlife, caught in a "perfect" marriage and enjoying her first success as an author. Events cause Suzanne to examine her life and marriage, and what she finds prompts her to seize an opportunity for passion and companionship with another man. This is a well-known story, yet Jaffe's presentation is anything but. She is able to convey the subtlest emotion or thought with minimal precision, and she's masterful with full-blown ecstasy or sorrow. Her writing makes the reader feel everything, with the result being that this is a book that refuses to be put down. A touching and absorbing story that lingers long after the final page has been read; highly recommended.?Dianna Moeller, WLN, Lacey, WA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 179 pages
• Publisher: Leapfrog Press; 1st edition (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965457842
• ISBN-13: 978-0965457842
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,447,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Intense Love Found Late in Life, July 23, 2001

By 

D. Jacobs (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dangerous Age (Hardcover)

Since this is a story of "intense love found late in life," as an earlier reviewer states (above), it would be nice if Suzanne, the main character, had gleaned some perspective about balancing her sexuality with the rest of her life, but she has not. Also disappointing, for all its erotica, Suzanne rarely asks for what she wants but is constantly "guided" by her lover, Robert, whom she describes as a "strong gentle guide to her own wicked pleasure" (111) and, earlier, as teaching her "everything"--"how to look, to watch his face, and see the pleasure a woman gives a man" (105). While THE DANGEROUS AGE has a strong plot line and is engaging on one level and might be a good beach read, the erotic elements are too male-centered and cliche to make for seriously good reading.

5.0 out of 5 stars One of those rare, one-night, all-night reads!!!, September 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Dangerous Age (Hardcover)

The Dangerous Age is one of those rare, one-night, all-night reads. I could not put it down. Suzanne, like her literary predecessors, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, is a woman whom others assume has it all...all except the one thing that makes life worth living: an intimate partner, a true love. What I most respected about this book was the author's honesty, her willingness to plumb the depths of a mature woman's sexuality down to the details of what is whispered (and revealed) in bed. We surely see a surfeit of twenty and thirty-somethings in bed, but the beauty of The Dangerous Age is that in a society obsessed with youth, it dares label a mother of grown children fully, sexually alive. Read on one level, that of its sensual descriptions of travel and food, the book reminded me of Under the Tuscan Sun; on another, because of its compact size and its focus on one passionate couple, it made me think of Eric Segal's Love Story. But my hunch is that this book will be around for many years, that women, and, yes, men (because the male lead is extremely real) will find it to be a worthwhile and stirring portrait of an intense love found late in life.

1.0 out of 5 stars Still a child-woman at 53, July 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Dangerous Age (Hardcover)

Thin and graceful from early ballet lessons, the heroine has a) never loved her husband b) gets cancer c) finds a lover who will cradle and baby her up to a point. Details apparently added to build character simply make the book longer. Sex scenes are embarrassing and many of the details--the slotted spoon, the hair artlessly coming undone--are banal. Yuchchch.