Meg Wolitzer, Surrender, Dorothy

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, 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 lifelong 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. 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 (review), 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.