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Product Description
Review
This stirring, evocative novel tells it exactly as it was Fay Weldon Not since One Day have I stayed up so late reading a book, but Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything has me gripped...So much more than chick-lit -- Laura Craik The Evening Standard The emotional lives of these women are beautifully drawn...It is, I think, the perfect summer read: juicy, involving and classy. Even as you smile at the thought that smoking was once considered a skill, and white cotton gloves a wardrobe basic, it will also make you feel nostalgic for your own past, for those feverish days when fear and elation were pretty much the same thing -- Rachel Cooke The Observer One of Don's first bed companions in series one of Mad Men is not another woman, but The Best of Everything, this 1958 novel by Rona Jaffe...It is a world of typing pools and tie-wearing at all times; of whiskey drinking and womanising; a world in which secretaries grope their way towards feminism with difficulty and bosses grope their secretaries with with ease...As Draper himself might say: fascinating The Times Decades before Sex and the City, Jaffe recorded the minutiae of women's lives and broke powerful taboos. -- Joan Smith The Independent I absolutely LOVED this ...what a great novel -- Elizabeth Noble Most career girls, past or present, will respond with the shock of authenticity The Saturday Review The book is a fantastically entertaining and witty read, following the lives of three young women, Caroline, Gregg, and April working on the New York publishing scene as they search for love while trying to succeed in the metropolis ... the book's portrait of young women at a vibrant stage in their life, their excitement, fun, struggles and friendships in the city, is accurate and timeless. A fabulous summer novel best consumed poolside with a cigarette and martini -- Lucy Greene City A.M.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
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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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Desperate Sex in the City,
By
This review is from: The Best of Everything (Paperback)
"You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth Avenues, the hundred and hundreds of girls." From those hordes, Rona Jaffe chose five composites and shares their lives as they navigate the complexities and ironies of 1950's Manhattan. Jaffe wrote this book while working as an associate editor at Fawcett Publications in the 1950s. Published in 1958, it was later made into a movie, starring Joan Crawford.I work on Madison Avenue and though we have come a long way, there are some things that the women of the novel share with those I currently observe. Jaffe says bluntly and immediately, "None of them have enough money." I hear and see that from those women today who are just starting out in their careers. On a practical level, this presses them to quickly find support emotionally and economically. It sets up some desperate relationships that when viewed objectively are positively head-scratching. And this gives rise to the five interlocking stories that follow the personal and professional struggles faced by these "girls". Jaffe makes some great observations that remain true today: hierarchical offices based on stature, bosses that intimidate to compensate for lack of skills, Seinfeld truisms like "You could die in New York behind the locked door of your apartment and no one would ever know until some neighbor complained of the smell", the role alcohol continues to play in many Manhattan industries like advertising and publishing "I like whiskey, I prefer it to people", and the season of the "Summer Bachelor" deliciously depicted in one of Mad Men's plot lines. The book starts well but becomes a tad long and repetitious. Jaffe is not a Yates or Cheever but definitely worth reading. She reserves her best prose for the top of each chapter - they definitely shine - including this passage, "Every square of light was an office, and in every office all over the twilit city there were girls much like herself, happy or disappointed, ambitious or bored, covering their typewriters hastily and going off to meet people they loved, or delaying the minutes of departure because home meant the loneliness of a long dark night."
5.0 out of 5 stars
Women of New York......,
This review is from: BEST OF EVERYTHING (Paperback)
Rona Jaffe excels with her story of five women who live and work in New York in the 1950.s. She relates their career and love pursuits with uncanny insight. She writes about the loss of innocence, about a love that turns obsessive, about betrayal and abortion. Bold for its time and still relevant today the book is well worth a read. Jaffe's "Class Reunion" is also excellent and comes highly recommended.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.9 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews) 56 of 59 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
5 young women meet 5 entirely different fates in Manhattan.,
By E. Fagan - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Best of Everything (Paperback)
I believe this is Jaffe's very first novel and, to my mind, also the best. Great literature? No...but character-driven, engrossing, emotionally involving and very, very juicy. Quite dated (takes place in the early 50s) but still a steamy and believably accurate account of what transpired for women venturing out on their own at the time...the brilliant, driven, heartbroken college grad; the sweet hayseed who loses her innocence; the "bad girl" who pursues an acting career only to lose everything over a cruel mentor; a single mom who exudes quiet strength & dignity and an absolutely provincial chick from the Bronx who smugly pursues her housewife destiny and is none the worse for it. They all surface at a large, glitzy publishing house for a time and live with the rampant, blatant sexism that was typical for the times but seems horrifying today. An ultra-enjoyable read with memorable, fully fleshed-out characters.
33 of 35 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great quasi-trash,
By Mary Fentum - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Best of Everything (Paperback)
Ooooooh......this is one of those juicy summer reads that is so hard to put down. Diapers dragged the floor, salmonella dripped off thawing chicken breasts onto the counter and the phone rang out its throat as I eagerly read page after page of this middle-brow novel.Joan Crawford is reponsible for me hunting this book down in Amazon.com's used book shop. I've seen the film of the same title many times, but it wasn't until my last viewing during a local Crawfordthon that I developed the itch the read the novel that inspired the movie. To my surprise, I loved the novel. The film was much campier (what movie with Ms. Crawford isn't?) than the novel, therefore less irritating to read than the movie is to watch. For one thing, Hollywood's presentation of the women in the film is much less rounded and tediously more condescending than in the novel. The "girls" in the movie dither and drivel and snivel far more than Jaffe wrote them doing. What was eerie about the novel was the contemporary feel of the characters' difficulties in their lives. Remove some of the dated descriptions of New York, business tools, and sundry material goods, many of Jaffe's depictions of women entering adulthood in a male-oriented world of more than forty years ago could easily be written today. Sadly, many of the demoralizing situations that Jaffe's five women stumbled into are, with slight alterations, still perpetuated and experienced in these more enlightened times. I think this relevancy along with Jaffe's engrossing writing style are what make "The Best of Everything" such an enjoyable read. It is definitely worth the trouble it takes to get your hands on a copy. 12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic, Fantastic, Fantastic!!!,
By Mercedes L. Johnmeyer "The Most Happy" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Best of Everything (Paperback)
What a great book!!! I loved the girls, the time period, and even though I hate New York City...I loved it in this book! I also bought the movie, so as soon as I finished the book, I watched the 1958 movie version...also wonderful!This book follows four girls through new jobs, new loves, lost loves, unwanted pregnancies, and death in 1953 New York. The pace of this book was excellent, and the characters were people you really come to care about. Seeing how there's so much to this book, I'm not even going to try to summarize it, but it was great! I can't wait to get my hands on more of Ms. Jaffe's books! I've added all of them to my wish list and hope they'll be just as entertaining as this book was! |
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