A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

Book Overview

Instantly compelling and immensely satisfying, A Fortunate Age details the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates whose ambitions and friendships threaten to unravel as they chase their dreams, shed their youth, and build their lives in Brooklyn during the late 1990s.

There's Lil, a would-be scholar whose wedding brings the group back together; Beth, who struggles to let go of her old beau Dave, a onetime piano prodigy trapped by his own insecurity; and Emily, an actor perpetually on the verge of success-- and starvation--who grapples with her jealousy of Tal, whose acting career has taken off. At the center of their orbit is wry, charismatic Sadie Peregrine, who coolly observes her friends' mistakes but can't quite manage to avoid making her own. As they begin their careers, marry, and have children, they must navigate the shifting dynamics of their friendships and of the world around them--from the decadent age of dot-com millionaires to the sobering post-September 2001 landscape. Smith Rakoff's deeply affecting characters capture a generation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416590803
• ISBN13: 9781416590804
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

This is a big, meaty book!

Pack this book with you on your summer vacation. This is a big, meaty book that will fill you up! It chronicles the intermingled lives of six intellectuals the decade after their mid-90's graduation from Oberlin. Initially, all six pursue careers in different areas of the fine arts - acting, music, writing and publishing. The story opens and closes neatly around the intense Lil and her friends' reactions to her monumental life-cycle events. Rakoff's prose is lush and descriptive. All of her characters are complicated and feel authentic. Some of her characters' insights are the type that make you want to say out loud, "I can't believe someone else feels this way!" New York City itself is almost as much an evolving character as a backdrop, yet unlike a lot of post-9/11 literary fiction, the events of 9/11 don't eclipse the personal events in the lives of the characters who live in the city. While this is a classic coming of age story that explores the effects of a group upon the individual, its immediacy has the fun and accessibility usually characteristic of chick lit. It is very much a Jewish New York novel, too, e.g. the characters had never attended a wake, most of them had been to Israel, and even the names were very Jewish - "Sadie," "Josh" and surnames "Gold," "Green," and "Roth." If I have any complaint, it's that the novel was about 500 pages too short because the author so efficiently economized each character's story, so the plot moved a good clip. This is a book to throw into your bag for your summer vacation!

Couldn't put it down

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.

Engrossing!

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.

Darker, Richer than McCarthy's `The Group'

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.

New York, New York

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.