Surrender, Dorothy : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Loss
Review: Sara Swerdlow and three best friends from long-ago college days , Maddy & Peter--a married couple, and Adam, a gay successful playwright, rent a house on the coast for the summer. Renting the house every year is a long-held tradition. This year, however, change is in the air--Maddy & Peter have a baby and Adam has invited his new companion, Shawn, an ambitious yet untalented writer of unproduced musicals to join them.

Just as the holiday begins, Sara is killed in an accident. While the surviving friends attempt to cope with the loss of Sara--and what this means to each of them, Sara's mother, Natalie arrives armed with fruit roll-ups and licorice. Natalie decides to stay--mainly due to inertia, but also because she longs to get close to Sara any way she possibly can. Impressions of Sara and shared memories seem to help everyone cope with the loss. However, Natalie's calming presence actually acts as a catalyst for the ensuing drama.

The author explores the subjects of loss and survival with grace and skill. While the book dealt with some rather depressing subjects, it was NOT a depressing read at all.

Rating:
Summary: Surrender, Dorothy
Review: 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 vagina [okay, that's a bit improbable too, but not what I'm talking about], Peter had seen her cervix open wide, so wide it might destroy him, might swallow him whole, like in some grade-B movie called Attack of the 10-Centimeter Vagina." The period should have come after "open wide."

But petty complaints aside, Wolitzer is a fine writer whose oeuvre I intend myself to swallow whole, grade-B-movie-like, slowly and with great pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: Unsatisfying drama
Review: 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.