Surrender, Dorothy: A Novel - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
Sara Swerdlow and Adam Langer are in many ways the ideal Manhattan pair. Their relationship is unvexed by the strains of sexual attraction, since both prefer men, and has even survived Adam's huge early success as "the gay Neil Simon." This couple, after all, can commiserate about lovers, talk about their favorite types, and ponder "the puzzlingly popular aesthetic of boxer shorts, which transformed all men into their uncles." Each August, along with their married friends Maddy and Peter, they rent the perfect Long Island wreck, complete with impossible landlady. Now that they're all 30, each is clinging to the last vestiges of youth--and a little concerned that Maddy and Peter's baby, not to mention Adam's new boyfriend, will alter the chemistry. But what no one can possibly know is that an accident will put Sara entirely out of the picture and bring her grieving, eccentric mother into it.

Killing off her ostensible heroine so early in Surrender, Dorothy may initially seem a bizarre undertaking, since Meg Wolitzer's fans would be more than content with her take on the foursome's summer holiday. The author, let's recall, is an expert social observer, and can turn a divinely comic phrase in her sleep. But in her fifth novel Wolitzer is aiming for more, and her expertly controlled scenes slide from charming farce to deeper melancholy. Set in a temporary summer rental, Surrender, Dorothy is really about the permanence of loss and revelation. --Kerry Fried

Product Description

For years, Sara Swerdlow was transported by an unfettered sense of immortality. Floating along on loving friendships and the adoration of her mother, Natalie, Sara's notion of death was entirely alien to her existence. But when a summer night's drive out for ice cream ends in tragedy, thirty-year-old Sara -- "held aloft and shimmering for years" -- finally lands.

Mining the intricate relationship between love and mourning, acclaimed novelist Meg Wolitzer explores a single, overriding question: who, finally, "owns" the excruciating loss of this young woman -- her mother or her closest friends? Depicting the aftermath of Sara's shocking death with piercing humor and shattering realism, Surrender, Dorothy is the luminously thoughtful, deeply moving exploration of what it is to be a mother and a friend, and, above all, what it takes to heal from unthinkable loss.

Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

Unsatisfying drama August 15, 2001
6 out of 8 found this review helpful

Wolitzer's book describes the changes in relationships caused by the death of a group of friends' close friend, Sara. The book follows the lives of four thirty-somethings and Sara's mother through a period of a month immediately following the death. In these trying times, there is a mass of sexual tension, sexual frustration, professional jealousy and general apathy to the world outside their own summer house. In relaying this interplay, however, Wolitzer fails to fully develop her characters. Everyone exists solely in relationship to someone else and does not have the presence to exist singly. While this does underscore their closeness to Sara and her former position as the nexus of their relationships, it leaves the characters flat and unfulfilling. Even the tensions within the group exist more academically than actually; Wolitzer fails to convey the deep emotions caused by Sara's death or the explosive emotions that (should have) followed. She also clutters the book by throwing in numerous other issues wholly unrelated to the central theme. Shawn's fear of AIDS, Nathalie's reunion with an old high school friend and Peter's guilt concerning his infidelity do more to add to the comic nature of the story and improve its likelihood of becoming a series of scenes for a soap opera than further along the central theme: coping with the loss of a loved one.

2 out of 5 stars

Blah...... September 4, 2001
6 out of 8 found this review helpful

What a bunch of adolescents. All pretty self-serving. And dissappointing. I don't think friendship is too awfully deep when you screw around with your best friend's husband. Kind of a book about 30 year olds not wanting to grow up - forget the fact that their dear friend has died. And talk about a suffocating mother....YIKES! This book is mediocre at best.

2 out of 5 stars

Tiresome tale of one-dimensional characters April 5, 1999
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

As a fan of Meg Wolitzer, having loved her other works, I looked forward eagerly to SURRENDER,DOROTHY. Regretfully, I was disappointed. The book takes place over a period of one month, August, as a group of thirty-year-old friends gathers for their annual time in the Hamptons. Although Sara is a doctoral candidate in Japanese history at Columbia, Adam a playwright, Maddy a lawyer, Maddy's husband Peter a teacher, they continue to rent the same filthy run-down hovel they've been renting for years. (Dorm life dies hard.) Horribly, Sara dies in a car accident as she and Adam are on the way to buy ice cream. The rest of the book and the month are attempts by the friends and Natalie, the dead woman's mother, (who inexplicably arrives to spend the time almost in her daughter's place) to come to grips with and cope with the tragedy. That this woman, who refused to allow these friends of many years' standing to attend her daughter's funeral, now feels a need to mingle with them is a trifle far-fetched. Throughout the month, we see how Sara has been thought of as the best friend of both Maddy and Adam. What is most peculiar is not that Sara and Natalie are close friends, but that their relationship is so all-consuming that every detail of their lives is shared - Every bit of each other's life is given up whole to the other - every day. The twisted irony of Sara's having thought at summer's beginning, that she would spend this August trying to disengage from her obsessive relationship with her mother and her mother's asking a young Japanese surfer to translate Sara's notebook and stumbling over "I love her, but sometimes I want her to leave me the hell alone. I mean, enough is enough" are the two most poignant moments in the book. Natalie is real, trying to accept the horrific fact of her child's death; no more will they say "Surrender, Dorothy" at the beginning of each telephone conversation, remembered from a shared passion with THE WIZARD OF OZ. The friends, however, are a trio of self-absorbed superannuated adolescents who, although pushed into the adult world a week early by the house owner's early return (Symbolism here?) don't have a clue.

4 out of 5 stars

Great summer read June 20, 2001
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

This is the first book I've read by Meg Wolitzer, and overall, I enjoyed it. The plot brings three just-turned-thirty friends into close and prolonged contact with the 50-something mother of their recently deceased friend. Wolitzer is able to pull this off because she obviously likes all of her characters, their various flaws notwithstanding. She also has the type of sense of humor that allows her to ligthen things up when emotions and events threaten to drag things down too much. The strongest character is the Mother, Natalie, who is one of the more appealing baby boomers in recent fiction, and by no means a mere caricature. My only objection is that several secondary characters are not as clearly drawn as the main ones. But in fairness to Wolitzer, in most novels the reader would not even care about knowing more about such relatively minor characters, and it's only her gift for making you care that makes this an issue at all.

4 out of 5 stars

Solid effort June 28, 2002
4 out of 7 found this review helpful

"Surrender, Dorothy" is worth reading, and worth finishing. The prose is lyrical, there are mesmerizing individual images, and the characters live lives that are spiritually bereft -- even before the central character dies unexpectedly -- which makes them unusual in this type of story. I can't remember the last time I read a book about death that didn't involve religion or faith on some level -- it is refreshing that these characters deal with grief without delving into that.

I would compare the author to Elizabeth Berg and Ann Hood -- all three are good writers who have a tendency to keep their readers at an arm's length from the characters. I never fully connected with the story, but I could appreciate it.

A solid effort,though I'm not sure I would read this author again. She's good, but not entirely distinct.

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