www.annemoore.net

 

 

 

 

 

Books: Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything”

Do you like television’s “Mad Men?” I sure do.

Imagine my delight, then, to fall into Rona Jaffe’s first novel, “The Best of Everything” (1958). Set in the early Fifties, the story follows a handful of working girls at a Manhattan publishing house.

Leisurely told, Jaffe (1931-2005) has a light touch with heavy themes. I lapped it up.

Caroline Bender makes her way to her first day of work on a “cold, foggy midwinter morning in New York, the kind that makes you think of lung ailments.” That wry tone is the voice of this engaging read. Caroline is a recent college graduate whose heart was broken by her Harvard man, who sailed away for a European summer and returned married to a Texas oil heiress.

What’s a Radcliffe gal to do?

Live at home and work in the city. “The job was more than an economic inconvenience, it was an emotional necessity.”

Also at the publishing house: Mary Agnes, the office gossip, saving up for her wedding in two years. Barbara, divorced, mother of baby Hillary. April and Gregg, sometime actresses, who take temp work at the publishing house to pay rent.

With the exception of the deliciously lazy and mean editor Amanda Farrow, the office is run by “Mad Men” characters. Mr. Shalimar (really!) liquors up the young typists and impresses them with tales of his friendship with Eugene O’Neill. Shalimar manhandles all level of female employees, after hours, and crawls under the table at a company party, like a dog, to admire a girl’s legs. He’s a fool. He’s also the boss. More likable but no less damaged is Mike Rice, an editor, who falls for Caroline. A divorced father living in a hotel, Mike drinks so prodigiously I quit trying to measure.

Caroline is interested in Mike, but pines for Eddie Harris, her Harvard man. She strings along pallid but decent Paul and teases movie idol John Cassaro. Meanwhile, a married ad exec pursues Barbara. Mary Agnes finally marries. April falls for socialite Dexter Key, who seduces her, gets her pregnant, arranges the abortion, then casually dumps her. Afterwards, April goes on a boy bender that made me blush.

Gregg’s love affair with Broadway producer David Wilder Savage is a lovely and tragic sub story. He loves Gregg, but her neediness is so extreme he has to let her go. She stalks him, disastrously.

The end belongs to Caroline: it’s wild and wonderful, surprising but fitting.

Also in the blog

With two weekend trips that involved air travel and a week in bed with a respiratory flu, I read a lot. Here goes: Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air is a seamless memoir of a young neurosurgeon’s last year. Woven into his dire situation is the story of his life: a happy, active Arizona childhood,

(...)

The fight for Algerian independence from France began in November 1954. That brutal guerilla war would continue until 1961, when French president Charles de Gaulle gave up Algeria, an African colony France had ruled since 1830. Among the French, the war was unpopular and misunderstood. Still, they had as many as 450,000 soldiers in Algeria.

(...)

My eldest son and I have an ongoing discussion about “The Shelf,” an imaginary but distinctive resting place for the best war literature. He referred to it after I finished Karl Marlantes “Mattherhorn,” a 640 page slog — in the best sense of the word — through the Vietnam War. (We agree to disagree on

(...)

One thought on "Books: Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything”"