Coming of age in New York

books:


	• The Best of Everything Rona Jaffe, 2005 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Coming of age in New York

I know these five young career girls starting out in New York City, and you probably do, too. Rona Jaffe gets it right - the sleazy episodes with drunken lecherous bosses, the awe-inspiring sight of the city at night from someone's plush apartment, the broken hearts and broken dreams, and the excitement and opportunity, too. For the reader immersed in this book, the world shrinks to the thoughts and experiences of these young women, and in each of their stories lies a remembered, or hoped-for episode in our own lives. An intimate and exciting set of vignettes depicting growing up in an exciting place and time.

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The Best of Everything

Loved this book! Very scandalous for the fifties... Affairs, illegal abortions, career gals, all in NYC!

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A new favorite

The Best of Everything is a pretty intriguing novel. Set in New York City in the 1950s, the story focuses on five career women: Caroline, the Radcliffe graduate who still lives with her parents; April, the naive girl from Colorado; Gregg, the actress; Barbara, the single mom, and Mary Agnes, the young woman who anticipates her wedding. There's also Miss Fawcett, an editor who's sort of a Miranda-Priestly-in-training. They all work at Fabian Publishing while dreaming of something bigger and better.

Jaffe intended her book to be a kind of cautionary tale, but oddly enough, it's had the opposite effect on young women everywhere; many decide to go into publishing or to work in New York because of this book. Like many other first novels, Jaffe's book is largely autobiographical; she too went to Radcliffe and worked for a while in publishing as a file clerk and then as an editor. One wonders if Jaffe's romantic relationships were anything like the relationships in the novel.

Though the publishing industry had changed significantly in the fifty years since The Best of Everything was published, in many ways this book is still highly relevant today. At one point, one of the characters says, with regards to the women who work in the typing pool (also known as "the bullpen") in publishing, "They're all college girls with good educational backgrounds and no experience and they're willing to work for practically nothing. That's why Fabian can pay so little and get away with it." The same thing can be said for the publishing industry today. It's really a timeless book, much more so than Jacqueline Suzann's Valley of the Dolls(which is similar to The Best of Everything in a lot of ways). For the time in which this novel was published, Jaffe was pretty open and candid about things such as abortion and sexual harassment. In all, this is the rare kind of novel where you really care about the characters, long after you've put the book down.

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Fun to read

I read this book one chapter at a time at bedtime, and it was an enjoyable way to end the day. I liked the characters, the writing was descriptive, and it gave me an idea of what young working women in New York City in the 1950s were like. I guess it was "scandalous" for it's time, but pretty tame compared to romance books published today. I also bought the DVD of the movie that was made after the book became a bestseller, and I was sorry that the movie didn't match up with the book exactly (though that's a problem with the movie and not the book.)

reviews: page 1, 2

When Rona Jaffe?s superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Almost sixty years later, The Best of Everything remains touchingly?and sometimes hilariously?true to the personal and professional struggles women face in the city. There?s Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor?s office; naïve country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; and Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Jaffe follows their adventures with intelligence, sympathy, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.

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