Surrender, Dorothy

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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.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
It's August in New York City, and 30-year-old Sara Swerdlow is headed to Long Island, where she and her best friends aim to while away their days dissecting each other's love lives, careers, and the rundown condition of the cottage they've faithfully rented since college. A graduate student in Japanese studies at Columbia University, Sara is beautiful, charming, and stubbornly single, committed more to her soul mates than to even the idea of marriage. But turning 30 is starting to eat away at that nonchalance, casting self-doubt over a woman who until recently has thought herself "held aloft and shimmering." Back in the cradle of what amounts to no more than a summer shack, she'll sort herself out. She'll reconnect to her best friend, Adam Langer, the "gay Neil Simon," who loves her more than any boyfriend ever has. In August, she will reexamine her ties to her mother, Natalie, who opens every phone conversation with the same password, "Surrender, Dorothy." This summer, Sara will surrender to no one and nothing but her old best friends and this life she's still busy trying to figure out.

Like Dorothy in The Wizard of OZ , however, Sara has a home to get back to. But it isn't the one she imagines, the one carved out of her time-tested bond to Adam and their other Wesleyan friends, Maddy and Peter and their new baby, Duncan. It isn't even going home to Natalie, who divorced Sara's father before Sara even knew him. Her destination is spelled out in the balmy sky overhead like the wicked witch's trail of smoke over Oz. Sara's fate is to die this summer and in death take onthecentral role in her pals' remaining summer weeks.

In her emotionally fine-tuned and thoughtfully paced new novel, Surrender, Dorothy , Meg Wolitzer (daughter of author Hilma Wolitzer) weaves a seamless tale that in its entirety reveals how one person can so uniquely bind other people to each other and to themselves. Surrender, Dorothy asks us to give up the idea that we amount to our individual lives alone and nothing more. Surrendering here means to forsake the doubt that meaningful connection — E. M. Forster's plea, "Only connect" — is impossible. Wolitzer's theme speaks death's words for us: Sara wasn't just anyone when she died, and a brutally quick car crash did not banish her from the living left behind. She was daughter, lover, best friend, and scholar, an important person simply because she worked hard, loved in earnest, and was loved back.

Surrender, Dorothy works the fertile common ground of some other recent popular novels, too. One of the main strands of Sara's charmed life was her devotion to Adam, a theater wunderkind who won over Broadway with his very first play, "Take Us to Your Leader," a comedy about a Jewish family on Mars. Their friendship bestows on both of them the sense of well-being that each imagines to be an attribute of marriage. Adam especially wishes they could add physical attraction to the long list of pluses that marks their bond. Gay male/straight female almost-love stories are in vogue these days, putting Surrender, Dorothy in the same fine company as Stephen McCauley's novel-turned-film The Object of My Affection T . (Expect Surrender, Dorothy to find its way to the screen, too.) And it shares with Ian McEwan's recent novel, Amsterdam , the intriguing idea of rendering a main character solely through other people's imagined and real past relations with her. Just as Molly Lane, the sexy photographer and shared lover of many a prominent Englishman, hovers over the men who vie for the right to her legacy in Amsterdam , Sara Swerdlow is the ghost that prompts each character's actions in , Surrender, Dorothy . Maddy retreats further and further from husband Peter in grief over Sara, complicating an already faltering marriage. Adam sees with striking clarity the faults of his lover and earnest fan, Shawn, an aspiring writer of musicals, as he compares Shawn's social awkwardness to Sara's uncanny ability to make him feel at home in his own skin. Finally, Natalie joins these four mourners in their cottage, trying to view from as many perspectives as possible this angel so swiftly gone from her, the daughter she loved perhaps too much if not too well. The surrogate family that is formed here brings to mind the world of Anne Tyler's novels as well as Ann Beattie's first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter . In a time of splintered marriages and greater social freedom, all these women authors suggest, we find our families where we can.

It seems 30-somethings are every bit as nostalgic as the boomers they're closing in on as the most formidable consumer force, and Surrender, Dorothy is full of pop culture references to the '70s and '80s. One chapter is titled "Brown-Eyed Girl," the Van Morrison song playing on the radio when Sara's car crashes. The title itself is code to any generation that remembers Judy Garland's "big-girl" longing as its own, while "Surrender, Dorothy" as a phone greeting is Natalie's signal to Sara to give up the goods, tell her everything that happened. The mother-daughter bonding verges on merged identities. Wrapping that theme up in the cultural signature of Judy Garland puts Surrender, Dorothy squarely on the literary map with two other recent works, Oh, Jackie by Maudy Benz and Judy Garland, Ginger Love by Nicole Cooley. In Benz's book, a young girl comes of age sexually at the hands of a lecherous uncle and draws on her passion for Jackie Kennedy to steer her through the treacherous path of adolescence. In Judy Garland, Ginger Love , two sisters take a road trip to their childhood home in order to divine truth from fantasy about their mother and her fanatical obsession with all things Judy.

All of Surrender, Dorothy's odd cast, from the aging and now daughterless Natalie to the young and floundering Shawn, who barely knew Sara, discovers that with time and effort they, too, can go home again. Sara won't be there physically, but like airplane exhaust trailing the sky, she will remain only a memory away.
— Elizabeth Haas

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Every August since college, Sara, Adam, Maddy, and Peter have shared the same summer house on the eastern shore of Long Island. The shining light of the crowd has always been Sara, a young woman with an allure that causes women to confide in her and men to fall in love with her. But then tragedy occurs and the overriding question becomes: Who owns this broken girl now, her mother or her closest friends? For this tight clan of young people, still dumbly caught in that nebula of their late 20s and early 30s, Sara's death forces them to rethink their notion of what it means to be a friend, what it means to grow up, and, finally, what it means to be mortal. At its most introspective and moving center, however, Surrender, Dorothy is the story of what happens to Natalie, Sara's mother. This mother-daughter relationship was of such closeness that they'd become a kind of couple — a couple that told each other everything. But in the wake of the accident, Natalie is forced to realize that when a child dies, there is only one truth: You can't get over it, ever, but still you have a life to live.

FROM THE CRITICS

Daphne Uviller - Time Out New York

It is Wolitzer's knack for situational comedy and tragedy that makes her narrative gamble a literary success.

Richard Bernstein - New York Times

Ms. Wolitzer...is a skillful practitioner of a kind of Upper West Side literary genre....[She is] a witty and likable writer witha tenderhearted, critical awareness of the lighter-than-air quality of her characters....Ms. Wolitzer's themes...make for a very contemporary broth....[The novel] retains its lean-cuisine charm right to the end...

Sylvia Brownrigg - The New York Times Book Review

After some uneven scene-setting, the ensemble piece begins, and here Wolitzer finds her pace....Buried within this affecting novel is the troubling question of whether close friendships and close family ties can keep a person from finding romantic intimacy....Sara didn't live long enough to explore that possibility; perhaps her survivors will be luckier.

Publishers Weekly

Each of Wolitzer's novels (Friends for Life) has demonstrated this young writer's growing grasp of narrative technique. Here, her seamless prose and light touch animates an exquisitely wrought story about the sudden death of a charming 30-year-old woman. Despite the tragic situation, readers will be intrigued, even delighted, with the unfettered honesty and wry humor pervading the grieving process that Wolitzer describes. Sara Swerdlow is "pretty, but not vacant," smart rather than brilliant, uncomplicated, easy-to-take, beloved; she dies in a car crash at the end of the first chapter, at the onset of a summer vacation with friends. Sara's mother, the heartbreakingly rendered Natalie, is devastated by her only child's death. (Mother and daughter were extremely close; "Surrender, Dorothy," they would say to each other on the phone as a signal to tell all.) She cannot face a funeral or the weeping friends, and arranges a private burial. But it isn't long before Natalie is on her way to the summer house where Sara and her friends always spent the month of August. Already at the beach house are Sara's best friend, Adam, a successful young playwright dubbed "the gay Neil Simon" by the media; his companion, Shawn; and Maddy and Peter, Sara's long-married friends who have just had their first baby. Natalie takes Sara's room and for a few weeks inhabits her daughter's life. She comes to know Adam, acts as a stand-in mother for needy Shawn and finds herself attracted to Peter, setting off a crisis as she inadvertently reveals to Maddy one of Sara's more troubling secrets. Wolitzer enchants with wholly realized characters and a sly narrative voice that floats just above the angst and searing grief of Sara's loved ones. The password phrase "Surrender, Dorothy" takes on a new meaning for the bereft mother in a fitting, radiantly understated conclusion.

Library Journal - Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence College Library, Bronxville, NY