Books in brief
"The Best of Everything" by Rona Jaffe; Penguin Classics (496 pages, $20)
———
Immediately upon finishing this lively, delightful and heartbreaking novel — first published in 1958, just rereleased by Penguin Classics — I pulled Mary McCarthy's "The Group" off my shelf and reread that. Surely McCarthy must have been influenced by Rona Jaffe. Both writers set their novels in New York and focused on ambitious young "career girls" in the city. McCarthy's (published in 1963) might be more literary, but Jaffe's was first.
In its day, "The Best of Everything" was groundbreaking. It focuses on four women — ambitious, hopeful, consumed with thoughts of men and careers and the future. They live in tiny walk-up apartments instead of at home with their parents. They work as typists, with dreams of becoming editors, or actresses, or wives. They endure sexism and sexual harassment and rape; they sleep with married men, they have abortions. Some get married. Some are lesbians, covertly. Some suffer from mental illness. Some succeed and others go back, broken, to Wichita, or wherever they had come from.
The book is not tawdry; it's terrific. Jaffe was 26 when she wrote it, and it was an instant sensation (and became a movie starring Joan Crawford). Jaffe said she knew she had a success on her hands even before it was published, when the manuscript typists demanded the next chapters so they could find out what happened next.
"The Best of Everything" seized the mood of the moment and told the truth, and women by the millions devoured it. Sixty-five years later, I did, too.
