Marjorie Morningstar

This was disappointing in the end. I really enjoyed it, more than I expected, up until Marjorie decides to have an affair with Noel and subsequently gives up on a dramatic career. Her (and Wally's) conclusion, that she didn't have "it" and her passion for theater was just the meaningless enthusiasm of a talentless girl, seems unnecessarily dismissive. She could come to a much deeper conclusion about youthful dreams and adult values and priorities - Mike is even thrown in as a screaming opportunity to do so - but doesn't. Mike, maybe the most interesting person in the whole book, only ends up serving to knock the scales from Marjorie's eyes re: Noel, not redirect her purpose in a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous for people, show more especially like her. The last chapter, written from Wally's perspective, is particularly disappointing; Marjorie isn't given her own voice in looking back at fifteen years of her life. show less

It seldom happens that I abandon a book and a challenge, but that is precisely what Marjorie Morningstar meant for me today. I found this book terribly dated and totally uninteresting. Perhaps if I forced myself past the 100 pages I generally consider my decision point I would find something redeeming in the novel, and finishing the novel would mean putting “done” to my Old and New Challenge instead of making it unfinishable.

Perhaps Marjorie’s life becomes more interesting when she gets out of her teenage/college days, but I will never know. I refuse to push myself to read 500 pages of this when I have so many books I am itching to get to. So, with apologies to all my friends who loved this book, it just wasn’t for me at all. show more What I found the most frustrating was that I kept comparing it to [b:Alice Adams|525818|Alice Adams|Booth Tarkington|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1259541358l/525818._SY75_.jpg|2197474], another teenager with huge ambitions, and with every point of comparison finding it wanting. show less

Herman Wouk is quite a good writer and "Marjorie Morningstar" is a really good novel. Reading this book was a perfect way to end the long hot lazy summer. A vintage coming of age and quintessential love story - but not the fantasy kind - it is poignant and intense, abrupt, bold, and realistic. You know the old cliche, “love is blind”... well, this is a perfect example.

Marjorie Morgenstern (her proper name) is a seventeen year old, upper-middle class, Jewish girl from New York. She’s lived the good life with her conservative family in a swank apartment in Manhattan and is now attending an all-girls local college. It’s 1932 and though all her classmates are looking for a husband… Marjorie has but one goal in life and it’s to show more be an actress. She starred in all the school plays and she’s got talent, beauty, and a tenacious attitude. But will that be enough?

This is Marjorie’s story. It is all about the struggle and hardship young starlets experience and the extreme conditions they will endure get a role in the theater. Struggling with the moral code of that time for young girls to remain a virgin until they married, Marjorie declares her independence and takes a job at an up-state summer camp theater doing technical work backstage with a few small walk-on parts in the weekly performances. She soon becomes captivated by theater director Noel Airman... charming, charismatic, witty, and a notorious egotistical womanizer. He’s what would later be called a beatnik or even more recently, a hippie. Thus, the drama begins.

Herman Wouk is great at character development, writes marvelous dialogue, and captures the mood of New York prior to World War II. There are some laugh-out-loud moments and many memorable scenes. Granted, the characters are not all likable, but with all their faults and weaknesses, they definitely resemble real people.

"Marjorie Morningstar" was made into a movie in the 1950s starring Natalie Wood and Gene Kelly. I didn’t see the movie, but understand the story was altered to occur in the 50s and took on a more light-hearted romantic theme with a totally different ending. If you want a more realistic story with intense depth and substance, please read the book. show less

I must confess to having read this novel shortly after Youngblood Hawke. As a result, roughly 1,000 pages of 1930-40s New York City dialect and social mores tends to grate after awhile. The result was, that about halfway through the book, I found myself not only failing to care about the "heroine", but actually beginning to dislike her quite a bit. Once that point was reached, I simply began to look forward to the end of the book.

Perhaps if I'd read it first, it would have created a more favorable impression. As it was, I thought if I read the expletive "Gad" one more time, I'd vomit.

In a nutshell, the novel follows the adolecent and early adult years of a Jewish American princess in 1930s New York City. Mildly entertaining at first, show more for me the book dragged and fell into a vicious cycle of relationship and career events that became repetitive at best. I've read most of Wouk's work and for me, this was the weakest. show less

I liked this book, and hated it at the same time. I liked it for a good read, but here we have this "the man and the girl," again, or as I'd rather have it: "the boy and the woman." Disgusting double standard going on throughout the book.

Marjorie was a middle-class, Jewish, seventeen year old who wanted to be an actress. We see her struggle for many years before finally giving up on that dream. The focus of the story is her first love, which was very destructive. It was difficult to like Marjorie as she was so naive, but doubly difficult to like anybody else in the novel.

This was an OK book in spite of Noel and his diatribes that not only were excessively boring but also just didn't make sense most of the time.
I enjoyed watching Marjorie as she "grew up" and while I agreed with her assessment of her life there in the end, it was interesting to read the last chapter and find that she really hadn't grown up all that much after all. She still believed that she and only she knew all the answers and how dare you insinuate that she did not.
A little editing would have made this book brilliant.