Amazon.com Review
Sara Swerdlow and Adam Langer are in many ways the ideal Manhattan pair. Their relationship is unvexed by the strains of sexual attraction, since both prefer men, and has even survived Adam's huge early success as "the gay Neil Simon." This couple, after all, can commiserate about lovers, talk about their favorite types, and ponder "the puzzlingly popular aesthetic of boxer shorts, which transformed all men into their uncles." Each August, along with their married friends Maddy and Peter, they rent the perfect Long Island wreck, complete with impossible landlady. Now that they're all 30, each is clinging to the last vestiges of youth--and a little concerned that Maddy and Peter's baby, not to mention Adam's new boyfriend, will alter the chemistry. But what no one can possibly know is that an accident will put Sara entirely out of the picture and bring her grieving, eccentric mother into it.
Killing off her ostensible heroine so early in Surrender, Dorothy may initially seem a bizarre undertaking, since Meg Wolitzer's fans would be more than content with her take on the foursome's summer holiday. The author, let's recall, is an expert social observer, and can turn a divinely comic phrase in her sleep. But in her fifth novel Wolitzer is aiming for more, and her expertly controlled scenes slide from charming farce to deeper melancholy. Set in a temporary summer rental, Surrender, Dorothy is really about the permanence of loss and revelation. --Kerry Fried
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From Publishers Weekly
Each of Wolitzer's novels (Friends for Life, etc.) has demonstrated this young writer's growing grasp of narrative technique. Here, her seamless prose and light touch animates an exquisitely wrought story about the sudden death of a charming 30-year-old woman. Despite the tragic situation, readers will be intrigued, even delighted, with the unfettered honesty and wry humor pervading the grieving process that Wolitzer describes. Sara Swerdlow is "pretty, but not vacant," smart rather than brilliant, uncomplicated, easy-to-take, beloved; she dies in a car crash at the end of the first chapter, at the onset of a summer vacation with friends. Sara's mother, the heartbreakingly rendered Natalie, is devastated by her only child's death. (Mother and daughter were extremely close; "Surrender, Dorothy," they would say to each other on the phone as a signal to tell all.) She cannot face a funeral or the weeping friends, and arranges a private burial. But it isn't long before Natalie is on her way to the summer house where Sara and her friends always spent the month of August. Already at the beach house are Sara's best friend, Adam, a successful young playwright dubbed "the gay Neil Simon" by the media; his companion, Shawn; and Maddy and Peter, Sara's long-married friends who have just had their first baby. Natalie takes Sara's room and for a few weeks inhabits her daughter's life. She comes to know Adam, acts as a stand-in mother for needy Shawn and finds herself attracted to Peter, setting off a crisis as she inadvertently reveals to Maddy one of Sara's more troubling secrets. Wolitzer enchants with wholly realized characters and a sly narrative voice that floats just above the angst and searing grief of Sara's loved ones. The password phrase "Surrender, Dorothy" takes on a new meaning for the bereft mother in a fitting, radiantly understated conclusion. (Apr.) FYI: Film rights optioned by Showtime Channel/Tribeca Films.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
