The Best of Everything

The first thing the contemporary reader needs to accept about this 1950s classic is that it’s set in a world as remote from today as that of Jane Austen. Jaffe is looking at coming-of-age stories of three major (and several minor) female characters trying to establish their careers in New York City. In all cases, Finding Mr. Right is one major goal. And in doing so, they stumble from one disastrous relationship to another with predictable results.

Most of the men in the book are lecherous, cheating, abusive, and utterly oblivious to the emotional needs of the young women they wine and dine and bed (if at all possible), and the women, unfortunately, seem to have the collective savvy one might expect of a reasonably bright 16-year-old show more today.

Characterization, of the women at least, is rich and detailed, and Jaffe creates a picture of the energy, the possibilities, and the power of the city her characters have set out to conquer. There’s an awful lot of boozing here, and all the characters smoke constantly – again, a reflection of the times and the social milieu of the setting. The outrageous sexual discrimination and harassment of the workplace is presented as perfectly normal and something one simply must learn to manage in order to survive. Still, for all the depth and quality of the writing itself, many of the situations are now sad clichés – the dissolute playboy, the philandering husband, the unwanted pregnancy, the emotionally abusive artiste. Contemporary reader may be forgiven for occasionally thinking (or even saying) “Oh, for godsake, girl, dump this loser and get on with your life.”

For all that, the book is worth a read, if only as a measure of how far the feminist movement has come, and – given the immediate recognizability of many of the situations – of how far it still has to go. show less

The tale of a group of young women whose lives intersect in the typing pool of a 1950 New York publishing house works as both an entertaining exercise in chick lit and a socio-economic investigation of gender and sexual inequality in midcentury America - which is actually intentional, Jaffe confides in the foreward that appeared in my version of the novel.

The girls represent a variety of socio-emotional archetypes: a brainy, ambitious college graduate (Christina), a naive small town girl eager to make her way in the big city (April), the single mother (Barbara), the aspiring actress (Gregg), the shallow, gossipy office manager (Mary Anne). As the story progresses, their lives intertwine with the lives of various men, also representing show more common archetypes, to include a buffoonish office predator (Mr. Shalimar), a self-loathing alcoholic (Moss), a privileged, arrogant socialite (Dexter), a prep school good guy (Paul), a small town sweetheart (Eddie), a bohemian (likely bisexual) theater producer.

Intentionally or otherwise, what all the subplots have in common is that they provide a lens for examining the uncomfortable relationships that form in a society that offers few alternatives for women other than marriage. In almost every case, the women are forced to tolerate unequal relationships - preyed on by their bosses, forced into sex (and abortions) by demanding boyfriends, courted by married men, led to believe that it is their obligation to flatter the uninteresting men and fix the broken ones. One reads on, hoping our protagonists will eventually find their power (or at least their self-esteem), but the end of the novel is, at best, ambiguous - perhaps reflecting that, at the time this was written, we were still struggling as a culture to identify what constitutes affirmative female sexual agency. (Lest it sound like I'm being too hard on the men in this book, I'm not: in the real world, it may be that many men found these relationships as oppressive as the women did, but that's not something Jaffe explores here.)

If the idea of learning more about the publishing industry intrigues you, just a heads up that you won't find what you're looking for here, the publishing house setting being mostly a pretense for entangling the various storylines. The storytelling is respectable if repetitive - every chapter starts out with a bit about New York street life and/or the weather - and there are lots of those "hi, how are you?" conversations that take up page space without contributing to the plot. But the midcentury ambiance - smokey lounges with names like "The Red Room," boozy cocktail parties, girls in smart sheath dresses and lads lining up for jobs in their fathers' firms - is enjoyably authentic, and the relationships feel distressingly convincing.

Found this to be an interesting bit of time travel - a reminder that while we may have convinced ourselves in the 1950s that we had achieved the height of modernity, our ideas about gender equality had a long way to go, leading to so much unnecessary exploitation and pain. show less

"Fiction places people where they belong in society. There is no such thing he said as a dated novel. The novel set in a particular time gives a picture of that time with all the details of life as it was lived then." (Elizabeth Jolley)

The Best of Everything is the story of four young women living and working in New York City - their jobs, their living conditions and their love lives. It was first published in 1958, and its subject matter and form have both been used in many popular novels aimed at a female audience since then. Can Rona Jaffe be described as the mother of modern chicklit? Yes, I think she can. Is this book worth a read? I thought so, both because it is quite enjoyable and for its depiction of the time when it was show more written and set.

Caroline, April, Gregg and Barbara are all in their early 20s, working as secretaries for Fabian, publisher of commercial fiction and magazines. Caroline has a degree, Barbara's education has been interrupted by early marriage, motherhood and divorce, and the other two have theatrical aspirations.

Jaffe dissects the ins and outs of office life with detailed observations about how things work, an interest in how her characters interact and flashes of sharp wit. There is a dragon boss, a woman who will do nothing to help other women in the workplace, and a lecherous creep who recognises Caroline's ability and promotes her to a role as reader and later a junior editor even though she rejects his sexual advances in no uncertain terms.

I found the lives of the characters outside work a lot less satisfying. This was an era when women were judged by their success in getting married (and preferably hanging on to the husband). I thought the way in which Gregg and April totally demeaned themselves in front of the men they had relationships with was probably realistic but found it all incredibly irritating. Caroline and Barbara were less pathetic, but at this time women who weren't married by the age of 25 would have been seen as failures, no matter what they were doing at work. Jaffe writes openly about women having sex outside of marriage including extra-marital affairs - her characters are not presented as immoral although sometimes they are obviously deluded. At work and in their love lives, these women's stories showed the need for the women's liberation movement of the 1960s, and the effect that wave of feminism has had on women's lives even for women who don't consider themselves feminist.

My favourite of the 4 characters was Caroline, who is bright and opinionated, and although she wants love as much as any of her colleagues and friends, is not prepared to settle for any old unsatisfactory compromise.

This Penguin edition of the novel includes an introduction written by the author for a US reprint in 2005 (she died a few months later) in which she described how she came to write the book. She worked in publishing and a man talked about a 1940 bestseller by a man about women, and wanting to write something as good, or at least, as successful. Jaffe read the book mentioned and felt that it was not at all a realistic portrait of women's lives, and that she could do better. She confidently proclaimed that she could write a novel herself, and started to do so. Interestingly, she interviewed lots of women about their lives and views on things and drew on this in her novel - how many modern chicklit authors can claim they do so much research into what makes their heroines tick? The inclusion of this introduction was a great touch in the presentation of the novel.

I found this an engaging and memorable read and a valuable period piece, and have found myself looking for some of Rona Jaffe's 15 other novels. Recommended.

I received a free copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program. show less

This novel about several young women working in publishing in New York City in the early 1950s was an immediate best seller when it was first published in 1959. It was also at the time, shocking in its realistic portrayal of the workplace environment and a sexual double standard, one for the women, and a vastly different one for the men.

Over six decades later in 2020 writer, editor, and audio producer Michele Moses stated in"The New Yorker Recommends" that “The Best of Everything is still one of our sharpest portraits of female desire.” It seems that the sensational and shocking best seller has by now become part of the literary canon. And what is that these young women desire? As the author described it in on the page immediately show more following the title pages of the first English edition:

YOU DESERVE
THE BEST OF EVERYTHING
The best job, the best surroundings.
The best pay, the best contacts

—From an ad in THE NEW YORK TIMES

Twenty years later this would be rephrased as “Having It All,” that is a good job, equal pay, a happy marriage and family, and love that is both emotionally and physically satisfying.

Alas, this is not the tale told in the novel. Instead, the reality is low pay, sexual harassment from male bosses, rivalry with other women, and a cast of bad boyfriends who enjoy taking advantage of you but won’t marry you because either you are not the only one, or you’re from the wrong class, or I would, but I can’t leave my wife and children. Or there are boyfriends from back home. They’re OK, but not necessarily exciting and they want you back home in Colorado or in the Bronx, not working in Manhattan.

This works out for the office gossip, who is already engaged and happy to quit work and move back to the Bronx where she grew up. In the end it may work, but for others the happy marriage only works out when you move back to where you came from after having been seduced and abandoned by the upper class cad who got you pregnant and forced you to have an illegal abortion. Otherwise, you might get married to the man you’ve fallen desperately in love with, but only years later after his wife has divorced him. Worst of all you might become obsessed with some unemotional man and end up dead. Or you could just decide to give up on the love and marriage part and decide to work hard and become an editor.

The author based the novel on her own experience working for a publisher in Manhattan and numerous other women who worked in the business. Unfortunately, the book remains just as relevant now as when it was written. show less

The blurb on the back of this book promotes it as a proto-Sex and the City, in the days when living and working solely to meet a man - THE man - was not anachronistic and rather pathetic, but expected of young 'girls'. Four women meet at the publishing house where they pass the time until they can get married and have babies, and become good friends whilst utterly degrading themselves over the first pair of trousers to pay them any attention. Behaving like twelve year olds dressing up in their mother's high heels and handbags, they each try to adjust to life in the big city, rooming in glorified closets and drinking cocktails, and dating 'boys' (these are women in their early twenties) on that eternal quest for an engagement ring.

I'm show more not a feminist, but this could turn me; I know life and priorities were different in the 1950s, but there is no balance of personality or lifestyle in this story, only desperate girls and smug men. Caroline Bender (unfortunate last name), presumably Rona Jaffe's alter ego, is the strongest character, fighting male chauvanism and office politics to realise her ambition as an editor, but even she is reduced to a simpering romantic by the final chapters. Hick April, used and broken by a shallow playboy, verges on becoming a stalker when her dream is shattered, whilst actress Gregg falls right over the edge; only one girl gets a second chance and receives her fabled HEA. Divorcee and single mother Barbara maintains her dignity, and strikes gold after risking all on a married man, and the good girls all dump their independence for the delights of matrimony and motherhood. There is nothing wrong with a family life, but it is not the only option, even in the 1950s - the career women are portrayed as bitter spinsters, and no-one dares to forge a different path. Caroline comes close, but then plummets harder and faster into the depths of moping, lovesick weakness - over the fiance who threw her over, by letter, after meeting a better match whilst on a gap year in Europe! When he, too, lets her down, Caroline goes off the rails. Any man is better than none seems to be the message, if there is one; if not this is just a depressing take on 1950s American womanhood, and propaganda for the worst kind of fanatical, man-hating feminism. show less

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe - Very Good

I've never seen Mad Men. I know I should have watched it, all the indications are that I'd have loved it, but I missed the first couple of episodes & blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the reason for mentioning it, is that this book features in it in some way. I think one or two of the characters read it.

Written in 1958 it was ground breaking for the times. It features four young women making their way in New York. The story mostly features Caroline who, after her fiance marries someone he met whilst in Europe, takes a job in the typing pool of a New York publisher. There she meets April: a naive country girl and another new start, Gregg: an aspiring actress, temping between roles and Barbara: a show more divorced, single Mother trying to make ends meet.

We follow each of their lives as they try and pick their way through life. Some are just working until they can find a husband, some want love but also a career. Each is trying to navigate the sexual minefield that the post-war, pre-pill world had become for the single girl.

The fact that this book details their sex lives (in the briefest detail) as well as suggesting that marriage isn't the only thing in life for a woman, they might actually want to work and have a career, is what makes the book ground breaking and scandalous - for the times. That the book is actually a good read as well is an added bonus. Really enjoyed it. show less

Wednesday 2nd January 1952; 8.45am; New York City:

“You see them every morning at a quarter to nine, rushing out of the maw of the subway tunnel, filing out of Grand Central Station, crossing Lexington and Park and Madison and Fifth avenues, the hundreds and hundreds of girls. Some of them look eager and some look resentful, and some look as if they haven’t left their beds yet. Some of them have been up since six-thirty in the morning, the ones who commute from Brooklyn and Yonkers and new Jersey and Statten Island and Connecticut. They carry the morning newspapers and overstuffed handbags. Some of them are wearing pink or chartreuse fuzzy overcoats and five year-old ankle strap shoes and have their hair up in pin curls under show more kerchiefs. Some of them are wearing chic black suits and kid gloves and carrying their lunches in violet-sprigged Bonwit Teller bags. None of them has enough money.”

One of those woman heading out of Grand Central Station, on a cold foggy morning, was Caroline Bender. Her college boyfriend, the man she had expected to marry, had left her, and so her new job was to be more than the economic necessity she had anticipated. It would be the focus of her life until she found her feet again.

Caroline was starting work as a secretary, in the typing pool of Fabian Publications. The Best of Everything is her story, and the story of four other women she meets at work.

Mary Agnes is the woman who knows just what is going on at Fabians, though she doesn’t expect to be there for long. She is making detailed wedding plans, and looking forward to the future when she will be a housewife and a mother. April came to the city from a small town with dreams of becoming an actress, but she struggled and so she took a job in the typing pool and dreamed of love and marriage instead. Gregg is an actress too, and she has had some success, but she has to take on office work to tide her over while she looks for more opportunities. And Barbara is a young divorcee, focused on working hard and doing whatever she must to hold on to her job and support her child.

I was pulled into all of their lives, and those women provoked so many responses. Pride in Caroline as she moved up towards an editor’s position. Happiness for Mary Agnes as she shone at the wedding she had dreamed of for so long. Worry for April, as she so often saw love and a happy ending that wasn’t there. Fear for Gregg as her love became obsession. And such admiration for Barbara as she worked so hard for her child’s future.

There’s much, much more than that, but I can’t set out the whole plot.

Rona Jaffe paints wonderful,richly detailed pictures of these women and their world. I saw so many places, met so many people, and I watched the seasons change and the years pass.

All of the details rang true.

There is a great deal of dialogue, and the conversations are so varied and so real that they are a joy to read.

I can forgive a novel from the 1950s that spoke clearly and honestly about many subjects that weren’t generally spoken about then – subjects like sexual harassment, abortion, unequal pay and opportunities – many things. A few under-developed characters among so many. The odd cliché.

But I can’t quite forgive the Best of Everything for rather too much emphasis on love and marriage as the ultimate goal, and for having all five leading ladies either sailing into the sunset or undone by love. Or for making its one older career woman a harridan.

I loved the happy endings, I accepted the unhappy endings, but I just would have liked to see one woman stepping towards an independent future, becoming a successful professional, treating her staff and colleagues well …

But that’s not to say that I didn’t race through the chapters or that I didn’t love it – I did!

It’s a wonderful period-piece and a very readable book. show less