The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe

I've noticed that publishing memoirs (or thinly veiled fiction) are rarely inspirational. Instead, they're more of a paean to the horrors of the industry. When I first read Another Life in grad school, I thought it was quaint. Surely things had calmed down in the industry since the mid-twentieth century. Then I actually started working in NYC publishing, and discovered how accurate it still was. Only now there are no martini lunches or perks.

My most recent Ghost of Publishing Past reading was Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. Written from the perspectives of several young women, the novel is a soapy snapshot of New York publishing/life/love in the early 50s. The ringleader of sorts is Caroline Bender, a naive Westchester girl who has a Radcliffe degree and a recently-ended engagement. She has no idea what to do with her life now that she's not getting married, so she takes a secretarial pool job at Fabian Publications. Caroline is positively jaded compared to April, a Colorado girl who comes to the city with two weeks' worth of funds and a vague desire to be an actress. A third girl, Gregg, finds her way into the secretarial pool as well. She's an actress too, but is more driven than April to make connections and plug away at the New York theatre scene. While the girls become and remain friends, the book kind of splits off into three different narratives:

1. Caroline, who turns out to be a smart and capable editor, rises quickly at Fabian, despite the heinous, chauvinistic politics involved. Her romantic relationships are secondary--especially because she's still pining after the fiance who dumped her for a Texas socialite. All of the book publishing commentary comes from her rise from reader to editor.

2. April stays in the secretarial pool, and eventually picks up a fluffy publicity job at the publisher, but her main priority is getting her awful socialite boyfriend to a) acknowledge that they're dating, and b) marry her. You can imagine how well that ends.

3. Gregg ditches Fabian pretty early, and makes progress in the Broadway world--but not onstage. She gets involved and obsessed with an established director. He's kind of a dick, but to be fair, many of their issues are her fault for obsessing over someone so clearly incapable of a relationship.

Most of the book is, as mentioned before, a sudsy, girly novel. But it does offer an interesting glimpse into my chosen industry fifty years ago (as well as the realization that junior editorships are pretty much the same). Also compelling is the variation and depth of women's roles and relationships. There are the women who are only working until they can land a man and retreat into the home...a single mother working toward professional success, but faltering socially...Caroline, who ultimately puts her professional and mental fulfillment over romance...women at the mercy of a male-dominated power structure that puts them in very distinct boxes: workplace playthings or home-making wives. The latter duality is especially intriguing to me--it's nothing we haven't seen in Mad Men or the like, but given that book publishing is so heavily skewed toward the female editors/executives today, I always wonder where that switch happened.

Anyway, for a bit of easy fiction, I recommend. The writing isn't challenging, but done well enough to keep the story moving. So the parts I liked were more about resonance than language:

"Blind dates...She could not decide which was worse, the anticipation or the final actuality. A year ago, six months ago, she had thought she was through forever with the unholy three of the single girl: loneliness, being unprotected and blind dates. Now it had started again."

"There was now more reason than ever to want the promotion, and Caroline began to worry about it....She didn't want to push him or appear anxious, but she began to have the fear that he was using her to do two jobs at once for the salary of the lesser one, and she didn't quite know what to do about it."

"For the first time Caroline realized how much they needed her here. She was a good editor and they knew it. And she was so good that she was above office politics and secret knifings and social intrigues. She would never know whether or not she had been close to losing her position five minutes ago in Mr. Shalimar's office, but her few moments of panic had shown her how much her work here really meant to her. It had started out as a stopgap, but now it had become a way of life. It gave her a sense of value and of belonging. Perhaps that, besides ability, was what had made her so good at the job that they could not now afford to lose her."