A Fortunate Age

Ah, to be young and in New York City in the 90s. Of course, I was only in Boston and quiet old New Hampshire at the time, but I get the idea. I loved Joanna Smith Rakoff's book A Fortunate Age. She says she wrote it as an homage to Mary McCarthy's The Group which tells a similar story of college graduates in New York, but is set in the 1930s.

I will say A Fortunate Age was a little hard to get into at first. There are a lot of characters and I had trouble keeping them straight at first, and then, almost immediately, there's a fairly weird sex scene that made me wonder what kind of book I'd wandered into (not that it's a bad scene, just completely unexpected by me). Once I got everyone straight, I couldn't wait to read it (I was on vacation so it wasn't hard to find time) and I desperately didn't want it to end.

A Fortunate Age begins with a wedding and--in a mockery of Shakespeare who liked to keep these separate--ends with a death. It's not a tragedy, it's not a comedy, but it is a life. Or several lives, as it follows a group of recent Oberlin graduates. And they sure pack a lot into the years between 1994 and 2001 (and no, it's not really a novel about September 11, so don't get all worried about that "death" at the end). People get married, sleep around, have affairs, work for poetry magazines, host their first BBQs, buy apartments, get acting jobs, lose jobs, write books or fail to write books, have babies, don't have babies, deal with crazy (sometimes literally) family, and generally move into adulthood whether they want to or not. Almost everyone gets what they deserve, except for two characters who are unfairly served. Tuck should have gotten worse and Lil should have gotten better than she did. But this is life.

When I finished the book, I remarked to husband Ben that there sure was a lot that happened to these people, but then I reflected on my group of college friends and realized we've had more or less the same number of "dramatic" life events, deaths included. It just seems more contained in novel form. And everything seems so hopeful when you're in your twenties, even if you're broke and confused. Looking back on that time, one character reflects about herself: In May, Emily would be thirty. Her moment of greatness--or that particular sort of greatness--had passed, hadn't it? But the moment had existed. She was sure of it. There had been a window, a brief exhilirating time when something might have happened--when she might have become (so painful to think of it now) if not a star, per say, a---what?"

Actually, I love the ending to Emily's story, so she should stop complaining, but I love also her thoughts here. I used to call being 28 the magical age. It seemed like every character on TV and in books I was reading at the time was 28 and it seemed that was the year for something to happen. (It didn't, but my life is pretty good now, so I don't feel cheated). You just think you are special and destined for greatness, when really all you want is to be happy and loved.

There are villains in this story, but no real heroes since it's just about life, really. There are truly good people and good friends and then there are a few that try to suck happiness away from you. Sometimes they succeed, but mostly not. Lil, the first to marry, says: ...If she left Tuck, what would keep her here, in New York. Her job, her friends, yes, but what were such things compared to a marriage? She'd thought friendship so important before she married, but now she felt that her friends didn't really know her--couldn't really know her the way Tuck did, even if that knowledge made him hate her. If we're lucky, we keep our good friends and move into good marriages/relationships. If not, well, there's room for that too in A Fortunate Age.

I definitely have to read The Group, now, though I'm a little hesitant because it's long (lazy and not on vacation anymore) and it was written in the 1960s (about the 1930s) so I'm afraid I'll become irritated by the attitudes toward women. When Lil (in the 1990s) gets angry because her husband says he never asked her to cook dinner every night and she says: "But we have to eat...What would we eat for dinner if I didn't cook?" Didn't he see that this was the point of being married? To eat dinner together, to make a life together, out of small things? Well, I can relate to this. But set in the context of a book about 1930s graduates of Vassar, will I be offended by a similar exchange? or just think: plus ca change... (actually, I probably won't think that because I've never used that phrase out loud in my life except when it was the title of a college text I had).

There are a lot of parallels apparently, In this book, the group's nemesis in college is described thus: Her prolonged exposure to academe had lent her a too-warm sense of her own intellectual superiority and sophistication, which, in turn, led her to regard her fellow students with unconcealed disdain. She adopted a world-weary pose in all her classes, even the Honors seminar...sighing whenever someone asked a question she found particularly elementary, and periodically trying to catch the professor's eye, so the two might commiserate over these sad products of the American education system...( Don't you HATE her? and know her) But then, here comes the real world, and you find yourself a mommy at a playground with unfriendly other mommies and a familiar face shows up and, yes, it's your nemesis, but you're so, so grateful, that there's someone there that remembers you when you were smart (although she probably sighed and eye-rolled over your questions at the time) that you find yourself happily following her home for a playdate. This is exactly what happens to Sadie in A Fortunate Age, a scene that is almost identical to one in The Group. (Plus ca change...?) Emily Bazelon made this connection for me in her column on Slate.com (about the dreaded playdate in general), which is really why I think I should read The Group soon.

Read A Fortunate Age with patience and nostalgia. Or, if you're a more recent graduate, read it with wide-eyed surprise at how easy it was to get a job post-graduation back then. Enjoy.