Customer Reviews

A Fortunate Age: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Six characters in search of themselves move to New York City after graduating from Oberlin in 1994, experiencing love, disappointment, personal growth, and perspectival change. There's a great deal to like here; the four female protagonists in particular are well-developed, interesting characters who have to deal with real problems, and/or have to learn to distinguish reality from deception. The male characters are somewhat less effective and more stereotypical, but are also quite effective. I enjoyed the book and will recommend it to others. My main complaint is the blurbing that the book is supposed to capture the experience of a generation. Well, maybe it does, but not my generation. These characters are three years younger than me and it is as if we live in entirely different worlds. The majority of the country did not attend a well-healed private college and did not have the luxury of leading lives like these. That doesn't mean that the book doesn't speak to very real conflicts in the lives of people who were in their late twenties in the 1990s--just that its appeal is less universal than the publisher seems to think. It's been compared to Mary McCarthy's _The Group_, which I think is fair--but like that book, you will only really love this one if you identify strongly with the social group being described.

I began this book thinking that I was really going to enjoy it, but soon realized that this novel would be one I had to slog through to finish. Though I'm the right age and education level to blend right in with these characters, I felt not one ounce of connection to any of them. The book was long and frequently tedious, and characters veered off on major life diversions with never a hint of the underlying motivations.

I was extremely disappointed with this novel and didn't feel the narrative spoke to me at all. These characters seemed to revel in immaturity, and the endless posing was exhausting to read. I felt like every character was a negative stereotype of one age or another, and they therefore never rang true to me. I had a really hard time with this book; the more I read, the less I liked it and the less connection I felt to the characters. I believe that Lil's wedding should have marked the transition to maturity, but none of these characters ever seem to actually mature. This is my generation, and I would hate to think that any of my friends resembled these folks...

I definitely found the characters mired in perpetual adolescence, and apparently unable to recognize that fact. Getting married and having babies doesn't make you an adult, and I feel these characters were all hiding their immaturity behind the trappings of adulthood. The ending was rushed despite my belief that the book is way too long. My constant feeling while reading was that we were missing too much- too many decisions and actions without any explanations. I think that helped contribute to my feelings of separation from the characters. I couldn't even summon up any sympathy when one one of the characters meets an unexpected end, and can't see how these people can be considered a group of "friends" given how they act toward one another.

As Mary McCarthy presented the "new" women of the thirties, Rona Jaffe, the women of the fifties, and Nancy Thayer, the women of the seventies and eighties, Joanna Smith Rakoff explores the lives of women coming of age in the 21st century.

The story centers on Oberlin chums who move to New York, seeking their place in the world on and in romance. Sadie, Beth, Lil, and Emily find that life is not simply the grand adventure of deep thinking and literary finesse college taught them it would be.

There are problems with men, problems with one another, bills to pay, and bosses to please. Parents are disappointed or distant; friendships disintegrate and rebloom.

What I liked best about this book is that Rakoff takes her time telling the story, developing each woman's personal history and inner voice. She takes time with the men, so that they do not come off as caricatures of goodness or neglect.

This is a fine debut novel with a deeply satisfying story about the world of young New Yorkers today. Rakoff is especially on target in the ambivalence of Caitlin and Sadie in the chapters about the "new" child-as-god approach to motherhood, with a fitting finish, a long, uncomfortable ride in a limousine for a nursing mom.

I actually had to start this novel twice. By the first 75 pages I had no idea what was going on, so I restarted it. My second attempt was more successful-I finished the book. It was an interesting read, however, there were so many characters and some well-defined and some not so well defined. At times the book leaps ahead in time, ex, on one page a character finds out she is 10 weeks pregnant and she had two boyfriends and the very next page a new character named Jack is on her lap (this is her baby, spoken about on the page before and then we find out who she married. Since so many issues are defined to the nth degree, it makes the reader wonder why the pregnancy and some other equally important issues are not threshed out. Anyhow, the book goes on with the interelations of these college friends and their husbands/wives/friends and then a surprise death and then the ending just drops. It left me wanting a little bit more. All in all it was kind of a jumble of characters, ideas, ideology, etc.

If your reading time is limited, I wouldn't read this. However if you have plenty of time and like to read this book could be for you.

I had a completely different take on this book than many reviewers. I liked it- tremendously- so much so that I found my self going in late to work just to read another chapter and getting honked at by the cars behind me as I was caught reading at stop lights.

While `A Fortunate Age' has been compared- by the author herself- to `The Group', this is not the irritatingly brilliant froth of Mary McCarthy's satire. It follows that book's structure and story lines but it's a darker, richer work, with greater empathy for the characters and a feeling that much more is at stake in their lives. It captures perfectly the transition to adulthood, the adjustments we make between our expensive overheated educations and the cold, hopeful reality of working life. And it captures the sense of time propelling us forward at that moment in life when we are just becoming aware that time exists at all- the moment when the decisions we make are made with less thought and carry more consequence than at any other time in our lives.

What is most remarkable about Rakoff's book is her prose. The sentences tunnel into the character's states of mind with a patient insistence. Her writing, though it pours out words like a fire hose, comes from a much earlier time. It has less in common with McCarthy's writing than it does with the careful line by line calibrations of emotion of Edith Wharton or Henry James (does its title echo his `An Awkward Age'?). This writing is definitely not for those with short attention spans. There are no snappy witticisms here and there is very little irony. Instead there's earnestness in the honest treatment of its characters that at times is heartbreaking. They stay with you (or they did with me) not as vivid fictional images but as actual friends do- fumbling and imperfect. Her descriptions of New York in the 1990's are spot-on: life on the edge of a desperately trendy world, written without ever succumbing to literary hipness and those binges of product placement that have become so common in novels about twenty-somethings.

Rakoff's long and meticulously made sentences slow time down by pinning us to the present moment. But the gaps that occur in the jumps between chapters are disorienting. The time lost only emphasizes Beth, Lil, Sadie and Emily's inability to control its passage. The book comes full circle from wedding to funeral. Its ending is desolate in a darkly comic way. Sadie, desperately lactating and separated from her child for the day is being driven around the empty center of Long Island that is home to industrial parks and miles of cemeteries. She's lost, trying to find the funeral of her dead friend Lil.

Through the course of the book the women, who are more connected to one another than the women in `The Group', gradually grow apart. Though ostensibly this is a book about friendship, it quietly makes the point that we go through life alone.

Joanna Smith Rakoff very consciously sets out to emulate Mary McCarthy's wonderful book about a group of women, graduates of Vassar in the 1930s, as they forge their paths in the New York of the 30s and 40s. Alas, Rakoff's book -- about a group of young men and women who graduate from Oberlin in the 90s and try and create independent lives for themselves in turn of the (21st) century New York -- fails to measure up on nearly every front, and suffers by comparison.

McCarthy's characters are vividly alive, even today; Rakoff's are ho-hum stereotypes. It isn't just that they are unsympathetic -- oddly, I found one of the most unsympathetic of the lot, Dave, to be the most vividly drawn, while the most 'sane', wannabe actress Emily, ends up feeling to the reader like a chick lit character who has popped up in aspirational literary fiction. Even stereotypes can be well-crafted and make you care about them as characters, or at least care about the plot. Rather, Sadie and her circle of friends never spring to life at all, and their drifting and self-conscious musings, proclamations and posing ultimately become not only wearying but deeply irritating.

That would matter less if the plot were more fully defined. Living in the geographic area that Rakoff describes, and being part of roughly the same demographic (a few years older, but circulating in the same world), I can see and understand what the author is trying to portray. The problem? Each chapter ends up feeling like a posed set-piece, rather than an organic part of a whole. The end result is a work that is as self-conscious as its characters' pronouncements. Few of the plot developments feel surprising, some feel awkward or unnatural. Her efforts to develop a sense of time and place are also heavy-handed, as when Sadie ponders the other young women and men in the streets of trendy Willliamsburg: the women "carrying yoga mats and clear plastic cups of iced coffee and thick books of recent vintage, hair pulled back from thin faces with small sparkly barrettes. And the men, in their low-slung corduroys and wide-collared shirts, carrying messenger bags or sitting in the garden at the L reading copies of McSweeney's or Philip K. Dick novels, stroking their sideburns." Such laundry-list descriptions are scattered with abandon across the hundreds of pages of this novel, leaving the hapless reader exhausted and eager to prescribe a large dose of Hemingway's spare prose for Rakoff, in hopes that she will pick up the art of the small and telling detail. When Sadie asks the unhappy Dave, confronting the reality that his life hasn't lived up to his dreams and aspirations (the central theme of this novel, as in so many other coming-of-age stories), why he doesn't start his own band, it isn't just a question. It's a question asked "in an overly-patient way, as if to indicate that they had had this conversation before, hadn't they, which, of course, made him furious." At which point the reader, like Dave, is ready to plead for mercy.

Beneath the heavy-handed prose and the ho-hum plot there is a good eye for characters. It's a shame that they didn't emerge more clearly. Some of the problem has to do with the multiple perspectives. Only in the hands of a truly accomplished writer is that possible; Rakoff isn't at that level yet, with the result that the reader seems to view each 'voice' through a rather blurred window and none emerges as a vivid personality in his or her own right. There's a lot to be said about 20-something angst in the era of the Internet and 9/11, and Rakoff knows what it is, but she can't quite get it into the voices and personalities of her characters.

I wanted this to be a book that I could love, regardless of whether it succeeded as a potboiler or as literary fiction. The problem? It has aspirations to be the latter, and elements of the former and never emerges as either. So it never succeeds in becoming something that my own friends in the theater would describe as 'authentic'. Rakoff has the right kind of eye and a flair for crafting prose; if she can find a way to control and direct them her next works could be well worth reading. As it is, this would probably make a great book club read (there are lots of characters with lots of foibles to pick apart in discussions), but I couldn't in good conscience recommend as a meaty or meaningful read. If you like the concept, why not go back to the original, and read McCarthy's impressive work, The Group? While it's set in a time that is more remote from our own experience, and its prose at times feels a bit dated, the characters and situations have never been less than vivid. Which is while it's still in print today; I would be surprised if A Fortunate Age is still on bookshelves in a decade.

2.5 stars, rounded up because in essence the author does a better job than many would have done trying the same impossible task of emulating McCarthy's book, and because she is obviously a good writer operating without a good editor to rein her in when needed.

I didn't have time to read this book, but I'm so glad that I did. I make a living reading non-fiction, so fiction is candy for me. After a slow start reading, and against my better judgment, I found myself staying up half the night every night for a week from chapter 3 through the end. I loved the vast complexity of the storytelling and tracing the interrelationships among characters. Wonderfully Chekovian, only perhaps less naturalistic and more stylized--the author's voice is strong and clear.

This book has intense and realistic characters making their way through life's experiences. I loved how the stories about each individual added up to a bigger picture. A throughly engrossing read.

"May you live in interesting times!" runs the old Chinese curse. I thought of it frequently during the long, long, loooooong slog through Joanna Smith Rakoff's debut novel, A FORTUNATE AGE. The era she's describing, the 90's through the turn of the 21st century, was certainly fascinating; pity one can't say the same about her characters. One comes away from this book knowing four things about its author: 1. She can write. 2. She needs a really strict editor (which she didn't have here). 3. She's read Dawn Powell, Sylvia Plath, and Mary McCarthy. 4. She's no Dawn Powell, Sylvia Plath, or Mary McCarthy. AGE is meant as an hommage (polite term for lifting plot lines) to McCarthy's 1963 bestseller, THE GROUP. That novel had the distinct advantage of thirty years' distance from McCarthy's gaggle of Vassar protagonists. Here, we're all still sick to death of the shallow, voluable narcissists Rakoff is characterizing; these women are irritating enough company these days on the elevator or at a dinner party. Four hundred pages of their psychobabble's too much to bear. And the lists, the endless, endless lists -- what they read, see, eat, hear, where they shop, the approved brands of everything from men to underwear. Giving Rakoff the benefit of the doubt, and assuming this barrage of information is meant satirically, it's still so shallow and reductive, you lose any interest in these gals. Just because they've read Mrs. Gaskell doesn't endow them with automatic fascination. And the McCarthy connection robs the book of any particular suspense the thin plot might engender; the reader yawns, "Umm -- guess Emily's nutty sister is the equivalent of Polly's loony dad...", then goes back listlessly in a futile attempt to sort out the interminable discussion of man problems that passes for action here. Even the new sexual freedom that might have given Rakoff the freedom to rethink Lakey, the McCarthy group's token lesbian, in an interesting, more honest light is wasted here with a wowless male character, Tal, who progresses in an implausible manner from second lead in Robin Williams movies to seeker of Jewish spiritual truth. The most amusing thing about the book is that Rakoff, disdainful of so much pop culture, has written a novel her heroines would coolly snub, should they run across it at the Housing Works Used Book Cafe. Think of this one as Chick Lit for the Culture Vulture set.

I enjoyed this book. True, it took a while to get going. But, for me, the subplot about Emily taking care of her mentally ill sister generated the narrative tension that the Amazon editor felt was missing. After that, I was hooked. And even before that, I was charmed. Rakoff creates a faithful portrait of a circle of friends from Oberlin (even if some of them - Lil, Tal - are initially not as well-developed as the others). Among the characters are many recognizable types. I also liked how the novel captured the late '90s zeitgeist while also having the scope and range of a Victorian novel. Dickens and George Eliot come to mind.