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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compulsive page-turner,
By
This review is from: Sudden Rain: A Novel (Paperback)
Bought this on the recommendation of my fave brick'n'morter bookseller, who told me "It's about upper middle class people behaving badly in Los Angeles--what's not to like!"
It's about that but it's also about people behaving well. The couples who populate this engaging fast-moving novel are all intertwined--socially, through business, and through family. Over the course of one three-day weekend, we ride along into the crescendos of their lives. The novel is also an engaging time capsule of life in a particular place at a particular time--1972. The prevalent issues then (many of which are still controversial now), come up in the normal course of the events of the story--feminism, abortion, middle-class anomie, rising divorce rate, changing marital expectations, ecology, war. A marvelous novel, thoroughly entertaining.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Left-overs,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Sudden Rain: A Novel (Hardcover)
This book sat in a refrigerator for 30 years before being published. Unfortunately, I can see why. Although, some of the author's "conversations among characters" were good, a lot of it was trivial, regardless of the time period in which it was written. Although I was young in the 70s, I have a hard time remembering women's lib in quite the way it was written here.
But, I guess the biggest disappointment for me was that I never felt that anything was ever brought to final closure. That last chapter "Pete," in particular. was very unsatisfying. Had it been published in the 70s, it may have been a bigger success, but again, this was a rather disappointing read.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"We're all on other marriages and divorces now. Isn't it fierce?",
By
This review is from: Sudden Rain: A Novel (Paperback)
In what may be the consummate depiction of the early 1970s, Maritta Wolff recreates Los Angeles suburbia--its attitudes, values, concerns, and goals--or lack of them. Her rapier-sharp satire focuses on the shallow lifestyle, the self-indulgence, the disregard for the wider world and the environment, and the prescribed roles into which both the men and women force themselves. Following the lives of several families from three different generations--the twenty-somethings, those in their forties who have young children, and those who are within five or ten years of retirement--she makes the entire period come vibrantly alive, every detail perfectly rendered to create atmosphere and reveal lifestyle and mores.
Her characters range from the college junior who has already filed for divorce after just eight months of marriage (and who is now living with a revolutionary intent on overthrowing the government), to two men nearing sixty who suddenly find the loves of their lives (despite the fact that one or the other of them is married), and also include a depressed woman whose three children and all their activities cannot fill the void in her life or provide her with a sense of purpose or fulfillment. The characters, while shallow in their values and motivations, are fully drawn, making their complaints and the waste of their lives that much more poignant. All the action takes place over a long, hot weekend in the summer, the dry air, blistering Santa Ana winds, and potential for forest fires symbolizing the arid lives of the characters, the passions and emotions by which they live, and the explosive actions which will change all their lives by the end of the weekend. Even in her conclusion, however, the author remains true to life--she does not tie up all the details, and she leaves many questions unanswered for the reader to ponder. The characters soldier on, dealing with their messes and the damage they inflict. Drawing little attention to her "writing style," Wolff creates characters who perfectly represent suburban life in the early seventies, every conversation true to life, every action plausible and consistent with the character, and every flaw of this society and its people revealed for all the world to see. Sudden Rain holds up a mirror, and the reflection is not a pretty sight. n Mary Whipple
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