Sudden Rain

In what may be the consummate depiction of the early 1970s, Maritta Wolff recreates Los Angeles suburbia--its attitudes, values, concerns, and goals--or lack of them. Her rapier-sharp satire focuses on the shallow lifestyle, the self-indulgence, the disregard for the wider world and the environment, and the prescribed roles into which both the men and women force themselves. Following the lives of several families from three different generations--the twenty-somethings, those in their forties who have young children, and those who are within five or ten years of retirement--she makes the entire period come vibrantly alive, every detail perfectly rendered to create atmosphere and reveal lifestyle and mores. Her characters range from the college junior who has already filed for divorce after just eight months of marriage (and who is now living with a revolutionary intent on overthrowing the government), to two men nearing sixty who suddenly find the loves of their lives (despite the fact that one or the other of them is married), and also include a depressed woman whose three children and all their activities cannot fill the void in her life or provide her with a sense of purpose or fulfillment. The characters, while shallow in their values and motivations, are fully drawn, making their complaints and the waste of their lives that much more poignant. All the action takes place over a long, hot weekend in the summer, the dry air, blistering Santa Ana winds, and potential for forest fires symbolizing the arid lives of the characters, the passions and emotions by which they live, and the explosive actions which will change all their lives by the end of the weekend. Even in her conclusion, however, the author remains true to life--she does not tie up all the details, and she leaves many questions unanswered for the reader to ponder. The characters soldier on, dealing with their messes and the damage they inflict. Drawing little attention to her "writing style," Wolff creates characters who perfectly represent suburban life in the early seventies, every conversation true to life, every action plausible and consistent with the character, and every flaw of this society and its people revealed for all the world to see. Sudden Rain holds up a mirror, and the reflection is not a pretty sight. n Mary Whipple

Bought this on the recommendation of my fave brick'n'morter bookseller, who told me "It's about upper middle class people behaving badly in Los Angeles--what's not to like!" It's about that but it's also about people behaving well. The couples who populate this engaging fast-moving novel are all intertwined--socially, through business, and through family. Over the course of one three-day weekend, we ride along into the crescendos of their lives. The novel is also an engaging time capsule of life in a particular place at a particular time--1972. The prevalent issues then (many of which are still controversial now), come up in the normal course of the events of the story--feminism, abortion, middle-class anomie, rising divorce rate, changing marital expectations, ecology, war. A marvelous novel, thoroughly entertaining.

I was drawn to this movel because one of my relatives boasted that she had been close to the author, Maritta Wolff, and that Wolff has named a leading character in her final novel, after her. Killian, the girl in question, is a rebellious hippie type whom I imagine Candice Bergen might have played at the time Wolff was writing this immensely long and detailed novel of five couples in Los Angeles during the late 60s or early 70s. I guess the seventies since the characters are all accusing each other of being "male chauvinist pigs," an expression you rarely hear today. My cousin reported that Maritta Wolff had been an active observer on the scene, always a pen in her pocket and she jotted down observations even when waiting in line at the grocery store, or sometimes when driving down the PCH late at night like a Joan Didion character. Reading SUDDEN RAIN, takes me back to the days when the thriller writer Ross Macdonald was getting a lot of play. Honestly, he doesn't have anything that Maritta Wolff had in much bigger quantities, and she did it backwards and in high heels. Her style is a strange mixture of Ross Macdonald's haunted lineage and Ayn Rand's powerfully detailed, and sort of crazy, social satires. Killian, for example, is the daughter of Linda, a Linda McCartney type who has kept her youthful blonde beauty for over twenty-five years and looks almost exactly as she did as a girl, but her secret is that tragedy and miscarriage have made her into a heavyu alcoholic who, in the novel's most painful scene, shatters through a plate glass coffee table in an effort to seduce the ex-husband (Mick) whom she hasn't seen in decades. He has to remove her hand from inside the waistband of his pants, then whap! She plunges through the glass. Mick is a former racer who also is eerily the same in looks, but in his case it is skin grafts from a horrible racing accident that have kept his skin looking preternaturally moist and youthful. Their daughter, Killian, has grown into an enchanting young woman who resembles neither of them, not really. She (Killian, or "Killy" as they call her affectionately) has just broken up with her young husband of 12 months, Pete. Then you hear all about Pete's mom and dad, and their neighbors, and little by little a vast network of friends, lovers, enemies and old acquaintances meet, mingle, poison each other's minds, and make up a little over the course of a weekend punctuated by a burst of sudden rain. Being named "Killian" myself, I have never thought of taking on the nickname "Killy" nor has anyone to my knowledge called me "Killy" which on second thought reminds me only of the former Olympic ski champ, Jean-Claude Killy. But it worked for Maritta Wolff. She kept the manuscript in her refrigerator for safekeeping, and also because (so my cousin informed me) she had had some bad experiences with people breaking into her house and taking a valuable piece of jewelry. In the end, her intuition proved correct

The reading world was electrified almost 70 years ago by Maritta Wolff's first novel, Whistle Stop. She was a young woman only 22 years old, and she followed that auspicious debut with a half dozen more exemplary works. Today, readers are being reintroduced to Wolff's work through her seventh novel, Sudden Rain, which has been hidden for some 30 years. In order to appreciate it fully, flash back, if you will, to the way our country was in the 1970s. Remember the mores and cultural values - the beginnings of women's search for identity, the escalating divorce rate - and all that we once were. Wolff incisively recreates this time by incisively examining the lives of Southern California families and the issues that are fracturing their cohesiveness. The author wisely limits her time frame to a long weekend, thus making even more pronounced the factors impacting familial relationships. Voice performer Barbara Rosenblat gives a stunning reading to this sometimes devastating, always riveting chronicle. The winner of 13 Audiofile Earphone Awards, Rosenblat is almost chameleon-like as she gracefully inhabits differing personas. Superb listening entertainment! - Gail Cooke