Customer Reviews

Surrender, Dorothy: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As a fan of Meg Wolitzer, having loved her other works, I looked forward eagerly to SURRENDER,DOROTHY. Regretfully, I was disappointed. The book takes place over a period of one month, August, as a group of thirty-year-old friends gathers for their annual time in the Hamptons. Although Sara is a doctoral candidate in Japanese history at Columbia, Adam a playwright, Maddy a lawyer, Maddy's husband Peter a teacher, they continue to rent the same filthy run-down hovel they've been renting for years. (Dorm life dies hard.) Horribly, Sara dies in a car accident as she and Adam are on the way to buy ice cream. The rest of the book and the month are attempts by the friends and Natalie, the dead woman's mother, (who inexplicably arrives to spend the time almost in her daughter's place) to come to grips with and cope with the tragedy. That this woman, who refused to allow these friends of many years' standing to attend her daughter's funeral, now feels a need to mingle with them is a trifle far-fetched. Throughout the month, we see how Sara has been thought of as the best friend of both Maddy and Adam. What is most peculiar is not that Sara and Natalie are close friends, but that their relationship is so all-consuming that every detail of their lives is shared - Every bit of each other's life is given up whole to the other - every day. The twisted irony of Sara's having thought at summer's beginning, that she would spend this August trying to disengage from her obsessive relationship with her mother and her mother's asking a young Japanese surfer to translate Sara's notebook and stumbling over "I love her, but sometimes I want her to leave me the hell alone. I mean, enough is enough" are the two most poignant moments in the book. Natalie is real, trying to accept the horrific fact of her child's death; no more will they say "Surrender, Dorothy" at the beginning of each telephone conversation, remembered from a shared passion with THE WIZARD OF OZ. The friends, however, are a trio of self-absorbed superannuated adolescents who, although pushed into the adult world a week early by the house owner's early return (Symbolism here?) don't have a clue.

This is the first book I've read by Meg Wolitzer, and overall, I enjoyed it. The plot brings three just-turned-thirty friends into close and prolonged contact with the 50-something mother of their recently deceased friend. Wolitzer is able to pull this off because she obviously likes all of her characters, their various flaws notwithstanding. She also has the type of sense of humor that allows her to ligthen things up when emotions and events threaten to drag things down too much. The strongest character is the Mother, Natalie, who is one of the more appealing baby boomers in recent fiction, and by no means a mere caricature. My only objection is that several secondary characters are not as clearly drawn as the main ones. But in fairness to Wolitzer, in most novels the reader would not even care about knowing more about such relatively minor characters, and it's only her gift for making you care that makes this an issue at all.

What a bunch of adolescents. All pretty self-serving. And dissappointing. I don't think friendship is too awfully deep when you screw around with your best friend's husband. Kind of a book about 30 year olds not wanting to grow up - forget the fact that their dear friend has died. And talk about a suffocating mother....YIKES! This book is mediocre at best.

Wolitzer's book describes the changes in relationships caused by the death of a group of friends' close friend, Sara. The book follows the lives of four thirty-somethings and Sara's mother through a period of a month immediately following the death. In these trying times, there is a mass of sexual tension, sexual frustration, professional jealousy and general apathy to the world outside their own summer house. In relaying this interplay, however, Wolitzer fails to fully develop her characters. Everyone exists solely in relationship to someone else and does not have the presence to exist singly. While this does underscore their closeness to Sara and her former position as the nexus of their relationships, it leaves the characters flat and unfulfilling. Even the tensions within the group exist more academically than actually; Wolitzer fails to convey the deep emotions caused by Sara's death or the explosive emotions that (should have) followed. She also clutters the book by throwing in numerous other issues wholly unrelated to the central theme. Shawn's fear of AIDS, Nathalie's reunion with an old high school friend and Peter's guilt concerning his infidelity do more to add to the comic nature of the story and improve its likelihood of becoming a series of scenes for a soap opera than further along the central theme: coping with the loss of a loved one.

Gasp! A fag hag and a gay man, both Jewish! A married couple with a...(wait, I bet you'd never guess) a new BAYBEE! A world of utter misogyny and lameness where MEN are the center of EVERYTHING, lesbians don't exist, and stereotypes abound! Maybe if the entire world wasn't fixated on Will and Grace, or "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys", this book wouldn't be so totally nauseating. But given that the pathetic woman who is obsessed with gay men who view women as circus clowns, footstools, or train wrecks-in-progress has become such a major overblown cliche, this book really didn't need to be written. Of course, the fact that the pathetic fag hag and the smug superior gay man HAS become a cliche has prompted a million and one books on this subject, trying to cash in on the trend. It is yet another attempt of popular culture to pretend that the gay man/straight woman sidekick pairing is chic, while lesbians (and both the women and men who love them) don't exist. Lame and tiresome, and I hope this trend ends soon.

I loved the first chapter of "Surrender.." and then the author killed off the most interesting character... But even worse, there are huge psychological flaws here... Flat characters.. Unrealistic portrait of a mother's grief .. and an ending that is so out of touch with the mother's reality.. It's just too light and doesn't , as so many books seem not to, deliver on its initial promise... Yet, on the positive side, the scenes are vivid, memorable and ditto some of the characters.. But that beginning was SO promising.. that the rest drops you into sadness.. not about the death portrayed but about the value of a great story that doesn't begin to meet its promise.

The title of the review says it all. The characters are shallow and the situation is contrived. Reading the entire book was painful, and I would not have continued reading it if it wasn't a book club selection. Save your money and your time. Don't bother reading this book!

Thirty-year-old Sara Swerdlow and her friends Adam, Maddy, and Peter spend every August in a run-down rental by the beach, re-experiencing in these regular escapes from real life their one-time college intimacy--that peculiar closeness born of cohabitation and limited responsibility that most of us lose at graduation. This year the cast of characters is expanded: Maddy and Peter, long married, have added a baby to the mix, and Sara's closest friend Adam, now a successful playwright, has brought along his uncommonly handsome new boyfriend Shawn. Their first evening at the house this year, Sara and Adam make an ice cream run. On the way back, a tub of soft-serve vanilla successfully secured from the local Fro-Z-Cone, Sara is killed in a car accident.

Surrender, Dorothy is the story of the effect of Sara's death on this circle of friends and on her mother Natalie, Sara's life-long confidante, who joins the party at the beach for a weeks-long immersion in collective grief. While her characters bicker and mourn in this sometimes oppressive atmosphere, Wolitzer explores the network of their relationships, with one another and with Sara. While the subject matter of the book is of course sad, the final product is not unbearably so. Readers like myself who shy away from depressing novels need not fear this one.

Wolitzer, meanwhile, as I discovered also when reading her novel The Wife, is capable of some very fine prose, rich in detail. Very often her descriptions are spot on, depicting in few words the essence of some banal item, for example, such as the "cool, dented metal surface" of the Fro-Z-Cone counter. Every now and then, however, Wolitzer's descriptions go too far, and the reader is distracted by some improbable comparison: "Then, during pushing, that two-hour period of time during which Maddy began to hallucinate a roll of theater tickets unspooling from her [body] [okay, that's a bit improbable too, but not what I'm talking about].

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

I enjoyed "Surrender Dorothy" very much. However, I would have loved to have know Sarah more before her accident. Her character was not fully developed. I liked her best male friend the best. I found the other characters self-absorbed and often annoying. The overall plot was interesting and often heart-wrenching. The author really made you think about your own mortality and how we can touch and be touched by others people's lives...and the affect we have on each other. Ms. Woltzer shows great insight into the human heart. "Surrender Dorothy" was a very quick read.

The novel is a wrenching page-turner about a woman's loss of an adult daughter and her subsequent attempts to cope and live. The author artfully describes experiences of the mother and the dead woman's friends as they provide each other with memories and support needed to adapt to the sudden death of a young woman whom they loved. It is the best book I have read all year!