[.ca] Surrender, Dorothy: A Novel (ISBN 0671042548)

From Amazon.com:
Sara Swerdlow and Adam Langer are in many ways the ideal Manhattan pair. Their relationship is unvexed by the strains of sexual attraction, since both prefer men, and has even survived Adam's huge early success as "the gay Neil Simon." This couple, after all, can commiserate about lovers, talk about their favorite types, and ponder "the puzzlingly popular aesthetic of boxer shorts, which transformed all men into their uncles." Each August, along with their married friends Maddy and Peter, they rent the perfect Long Island wreck, complete with impossible landlady. Now that they're all 30, each is clinging to the last vestiges of youth--and a little concerned that Maddy and Peter's baby, not to mention Adam's new boyfriend, will alter the chemistry. But what no one can possibly know is that an accident will put Sara entirely out of the picture and bring her grieving, eccentric mother into it. Killing off her ostensible heroine so early in Surrender, Dorothy may initially seem a bizarre undertaking, since Meg Wolitzer's fans would be more than content with her take on the foursome's summer holiday. The author, let's recall, is an expert social observer, and can turn a divinely comic phrase in her sleep. But in her fifth novel Wolitzer is aiming for more, and her expertly controlled scenes slide from charming farce to deeper melancholy. Set in a temporary summer rental, Surrender, Dorothy is really about the permanence of loss and revelation. --Kerry Fried

We aren't in Kansas anymore:
I enjoyed "Surrender Dorothy" very much. However, I would have loved to have know Sarah more before her accident. Her character was not fully developed. I liked her best male friend the best. I found the other characters self-absorbed and often annoying. The overall plot was interesting and often heart-wrenching. The author really made you think about your own mortality and how we can touch and be touched by others people's lives...and the affect we have on each other. Ms. Woltzer shows great insight into the human heart. "Surrender Dorothy" was a very quick read.

Unsatisfying drama:
Wolitzer's book describes the changes in relationships caused by the death of a group of friends' close friend, Sara. The book follows the lives of four thirty-somethings and Sara's mother through a period of a month immediately following the death. In these trying times, there is a mass of sexual tension, sexual frustration, professional jealousy and general apathy to the world outside their own summer house. In relaying this interplay, however, Wolitzer fails to fully develop her characters. Everyone exists solely in relationship to someone else and does not have the presence to exist singly. While this does underscore their closeness to Sara and her former position as the nexus of their relationships, it leaves the characters flat and unfulfilling. Even the tensions within the group exist more academically than actually; Wolitzer fails to convey the deep emotions caused by Sara's death or the explosive emotions that (should have) followed. She also clutters the book by throwing in numerous other issues wholly unrelated to the central theme. Shawn's fear of AIDS, Nathalie's reunion with an old high school friend and Peter's guilt concerning his infidelity do more to add to the comic nature of the story and improve its likelihood of becoming a series of scenes for a soap opera than further along the central theme: coping with the loss of a loved one.

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 this year, 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 life-long 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, with one another and with Sara. 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, 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 \ookay, that's a bit improbable too, but not what I'm talking about\c, 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.

Solid effort:
"Surrender, Dorothy" is worth reading, and worth finishing. The prose is lyrical, there are mesmerizing individual images, and the characters live lives that are spiritually bereft -- even before the central character dies unexpectedly -- which makes them unusual in this type of story. I can't remember the last time I read a book about death that didn't involve religion or faith on some level -- it is refreshing that these characters deal with grief without delving into that. I would compare the author to Elizabeth Berg and Ann Hood -- all three are good writers who have a tendency to keep their readers at an arm's length from the characters. I never fully connected with the story, but I could appreciate it. A solid effort,though I'm not sure I would read this author again. She's good, but not entirely distinct.

Blah......:
What a bunch of adolescents. All pretty self-serving. And dissappointing. I don't think friendship is too awfully deep when you screw around with your best friend's husband. Kind of a book about 30 year olds not wanting to grow up - forget the fact that their dear friend has died. And talk about a suffocating mother....YIKES! This book is mediocre at best.