The Best of Everything

I ordered this book when I noticed Don Draper reading it in Season 1 of Mad Men. From there I was nothing if not utterly blown away. Rona Jaffe has a timeless voice that captures every nuance of 1950s vernacular while slicing to the very core of her most contemporary readers. Times have changed, but the struggles that these richly drawn characters face are all too common for any woman who has ever tried to have it all, all at once. I only wish I would have read this book when I was a bit younger! There are only so many types of personalities in the world. In this book, Jaffe helps us build a better understanding of many of them. Armed with her insight, I feel that much more ready to take on the world!

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.

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

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.

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.