A Fortunate Age: first-world problems of the privileged class

Joanna Rakoff’s novel A Fortunate Age focuses on a group of friends trying to make a meaningful life in the big city.

Detail from the cover of A Fortunate Age by Joanna Rakoff.

Joanna Rakoff’s memoir My Salinger Year, published last year, chronicled the time she spent in the late 1990s working as a lowly assistant at a New York literary agency, where one of her jobs was to open mail sent to reclusive novelist JD Salinger. In the wake of that book’s success, Rakoff’s publisher is re-releasing her debut novel. A Fortunate Age, first published in 2009, is a fictional account of the same period covered in the memoir, focusing on a group of young upper middle-class friends trying to make a meaningful life in the big city. The friends have recently graduated from Oberlin, a progressive liberal arts college, and the novel charts their struggles to reconcile their artistic, cultural and feminist ideals with the realities of adult life.

The story opens with Lil’s wedding in 1998: the tech boom is in full swing, and jobs in publishing and journalism still offer a viable alternative to graduate school, although the mood of optimism quickly darkens. From here the novel shifts between the points of view of Lil, Beth, Emily, Emily’s ex-boyfriend Dave and Sadie.

Part satire, part novel of manners, part coming-of-age story, A Fortunate Age is described by the author as a homage to Mary McCarthy’s 1963 bestselling scandalous novel The Group, which followed the fortunes of a group of Vassar College graduates in the 1930s as they navigated the world of sex and marriage.

Sex doesn’t preoccupy Rakoff but she is interested, like McCarthy, in the compromises her characters are compelled to make in a world where their artistic and intellectual aspirations are no longer nurtured and indulged as they were at Oberlin. Lil has depressing, predictable arguments with her grad school dropout husband about whether poetry matters, and eventually drops out of grad school too so she can support them both, sort of, with a job at a poetry foundation (aided by substantial parental subsidies.)

Emily fails in her ambitions to become a Broadway star but is rescued by marriage to a rich psychiatrist. Sadie leaves her job as an up-and-coming editor to become a full-time mother. Beth, a promising academic, finds herself in the loop of never-ending casual teaching and schlepping her stepson around to his various after-school enrichment activities.

Rakoff does not treat her characters with McCarthy’s cool, sometimes cruel satirical bent: she seems much more sympathetic towards her Oberlin group, but often the tone of the novel is hard to pin down. Are we meant to critique Beth’s capitulation to the black hole of suburban convention or smile and sympathise? Are we invited to applaud when Emily accepts the weird hospital bedside proposal of Dr Gitter, the irritating psychiatrist, solving all her debt problems in one stroke, or be sceptical? The narrative seems to evade the question, slipping into another character’s story and point of view before the present situation is resolved.

Rakoff saves her sharpest satire for the opportunistic outsider Caitlin Green, a hypocritical, anarchist vegan who justifies her husband-stealing ways with insincere critiques of marriage and monogamy. Caitlin is clearly a villain and a caricature, but it is hard to know what position the novel invites the reader to take on the dramatic self-absorption of the friends, their unthinking acceptance of their privilege. We feel for lonely Sadie, whose filmmaker husband is often away for work because, the novel explains, “though she told neither her parents nor her friends this, they needed money, badly’’. But Sadie has a trust fund that helped pay her rent through lean years as an exploited assistant and they live in a Manhattan apartment left to her by a dead aunt; how badly off can they be, it seems reasonable to ask.

At college the friends were outspoken feminists opposed to marriage, but Lil reconciles herself fairly easily to her traditional ivory satin gown and heirloom diamond ring, to the bewilderment of her friends — although they soon find themselves in much the same position. Beth’s mother, we are told, got married barefoot in a sundress back in the liberal 1960s, but since then she has become a suburban matron and imposes the full wedding arcana on her daughter: the right white dress from the right shop, invitations on the right card stock with the right wording, the right registry, and so on.

And Beth submits: this is how social conventions reproduce themselves, it seems, in the hands of people who seem to want to insist on their distinction from them, their knowing distance that narrows down to nothing at all. The novel’s opening epigraph from George Eliot aptly sums up the unresolved dilemmas of these young women, determined to believe in their own exceptionalism: “she did not wish to lead the same sort of life as ordinary young ladies did; but what she was not clear upon was, how she should set about leading any other ...”

Kirsten Tranter is the author of the novels The Legacy and A Common Loss.

A Fortunate Age

By Joanna Rakoff

Bloomsbury, 503pp, $32.99