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    A Fortunate Age
    A Fortunate Age
    A Fortunate Age
    Audiobook19 hours

    A Fortunate Age

    Written by Joanna Smith Rakoff

    Narrated by Christina Moore

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Like The Group, Mary McCarthy's classic tale about coming of age in New York, Joanna Smith Rakoff 's richly drawn and immensely satisfying first novel details the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates whose ambitions and friendships threaten to unravel as they chase their dreams, shed their youth, and build their lives in Brooklyn during the late 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century. There's Lil, a would-be scholar whose marriage to an egotistical writer initially brings the group back together (and ultimately drives it apart); Beth, who struggles to let go of her old beau Dave, a onetime piano prodigy trapped by his own insecurity; Emily, an actor perpetually on the verge of success -- and starvation -- who grapples with her jealousy of Tal, whose acting career has taken off. At the center of their orbit is wry, charismatic Sadie Peregrine, who coolly observes her friends' mistakes but can't quite manage to avoid making her own. As they begin their careers, marry, and have children, they must navigate the shifting dynamics of their friendships and of the world around them. Set against the backdrop of the vast economic and political changes of the era -- from the decadent age of dot-com millionaires to the sobering post-September 2001 landscape -- Smith Rakoff's deeply affecting characters and incisive social commentary are reminiscent of the great Victorian novels. This brilliant and ambitious debut captures a generation and heralds the arrival of a bold and important new writer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 12, 2009
    ISBN9781440718151
    A Fortunate Age
    Author

    Joanna Smith Rakoff

    Joanna Smith Rakoff has written for The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College; an M.A. from University College, London; and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She lives in New York with her husband and son.

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    Reviews for A Fortunate Age

    3/5

    63 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I really, really enjoyed reading this book. I know some people will have trouble reading about the struggles of relatively privileged 20-somethings in New York -- if you're one of those people, then this book is not for you -- but I just devoured this book. The story of six Oberlin College graduates living their post-collegiate lives in New York, this book pulls off the considerable feat of shifting perspective between the characters. The jacket copy of the book described it as being in the tradition of 19th Century novels, and I suppose that would be right. It did feel a bit like reading a Jane Austen book.I've come to admire authors who can tell a story that unfolds over several years, and Smith Rakoff does a fine job of this, deftly moving between excruciatingly drawn-out scenes told in painstaking detail and grand, sweeping paragraphs that sum up a month or a season. This is no simple thing, to move through time like that. It's a skill that eludes many talented authors. I also liked that this book took place in New York before and after the 9/11 attacks, but it didn't become maudlin or overwrought. The characters noted the attacks, and some of them were clearly changed by them, but it was the way I felt changed by them. This wasn't a story about people who survived the 9/11 attacks or those who didn't survive them, but rather about the way life was -- both before and after -- for all those millions of people who lived in the city when it happened.If I have a criticism of the book, it's that the joints between sections, and the allotment of time between characters seemed a bit off. Why do we spend so little time with some and so much more with others? I would've enjoyed more from petulant, petty Dave's perspective (I fear I might be the only reader with this request), and I wondered more about Beth and Will. Still, it didn't stop me from enjoying the many chapters that lingered on Sadie. I think she was probably my favorite character in the end. And in this book, there were so many to choose from.
    • 1/5
      "A Fortunate Age" by Joanna Smith Rakoff is the story of six 20 somethings, starting out in New York. It is set in the late 90s and turn of the century, and follows five Oberlin graduates as they shed their youth and start their lives.I found that the characters were difficult to follow and I didn't feel that the characters were fully developed. The author focuses each chapter on one character but doesn't go into enough depth in any of them to make me care about them. Smith Rakoff uses flashbacks to try to fill in some of the gaps, but instead of helping, I feel it makes it difficult to keep everyone's story straight. None of the characters in this first novel by Smith Rakoff, is memorable. The author used language that tries to emulate that of Edith Wharton or Charles Dickens and is used to try to fill the depth of this book. Not a successful endeavor. If there was a plot, I couldn't find it. I finished the book only because I hoped that the next chapter would be better. Instead, I was disappointed and no less confused.
    • 4/5
      Slow start but then a good read.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book as well. Like some of the reviews, I didn't relate to the characters- my life and the people I know don't follow the same arc as the characters in the book. However, their lives were appealing in many ways. I loved the references to NYC, and it made me want to jump on a plane and fly there, if only to figure out the subway system. A Fortunate Age would be a good book for the beach or a car trip this summer.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book. True, it took a while to get going. But, for me, the subplot about Emily taking care of her mentally ill sister generated the narrative tension that the Amazon editor felt was missing. After that, I was hooked. And even before that, I was charmed. Rakoff creates a faithful portrait of a circle of friends from Oberlin (even if some of them - Lil, Tal - are initially not as well-developed as the others). Among the characters are many recognizable types. I also liked how the novel captured the late '90s zeitgeist while also having the scope and range of a Victorian novel. Dickens and George Eliot come to mind.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the book very much! It may be in part that I'd recently moved to NYC so the location descriptions and dialogue seemed very plausible. It is also because though my own experience is very different from that of the characters, I could relate to the various dilemmas and complicated relationships that the lead women confronted.I had expected that I would enjoy the book but thought it would be lighter and frothy and was happy to find it much meatier and engrossing than I'd expected!
    • 3/5
      "A Fortunate Age" follow of group of friends from the Oberlin class of 94 in the late 90s and early 00s as they pursue their dreams in NYC. The novel centers around 6 friends, Lil, Beth, Emily, Sadie, Tal, and Dave--and slowly works in their larger circle of friends and family. As the novel progresses, each of the characters realizes the dreams and ideals they developed in their late 20s are unattainable--whether its a career, a great love, or an art. Eventually, in the shadow of 9/11 they all come to terms with their personal failures after a personal tragedy shakes them all. Joanna Smith Rakoff has a wonderful way of capturing people, so this book--her first novel--has rich character descriptions and wonderfully captures the way relationships ebb and flow between people over time. However, the novel lacks the continuous narrative thread that I feel is critical to a real great work. Instead of feeling like one book, A Fortunate Age felt like a collection of short stories told by different characters, an effect that was heightened by the long chapters--there were only 15 in 400 pages of text. At the end of each story, there was no resolution of the character's narrative, and even though you would expect important story elements to be resolved in the next chapter, it never happened, leaving this reader feeling confused and the story disjointed. By the end of the novel I was frustrated because I felt like their were just too many gaps in the story for me to be able to really enjoy it. I would be interested to read other, perhaps shorter works by Rakoff, because I think she is a talented writer. However, the structure of this novel just didn't work for me.
    • 4/5
      A Fortunate Age by Joanna Smith Rakoff, approaches a group of post-graduate Gen-Xers as they begin their adult lives tackling friendship, coupling, love and sex. Rackoff is a tactical author who employs fresh methods of story telling to establish excitement and interest. For example, instead of getting a narrative of events central to the story, we get character reactions to some of these events, as the group tries to relate major events to how they may affect their own lives. To accomplish this we get a lost of tangents and back story which then clarifies character’s motive and thought processes. Huge plot developments are not even mentioned—only inferred later in the story. Such devices combine ensuring a dramatic story arc for all of the characters, and a book that reads as more of complex study of characters then a typical novel. Readers will literally climb into Rakoff’s group and the minds of its members. Overall, Rakoff delivers a strong and highly literary debut. The layered examination of New York culture during the time period reads like a modernized Wharton.
    • 4/5
      A Fortunate Age is an exploration of a group of college friends as they navigate early adulthood and establish post-graduation lives in late-1990s/early-2000s New York City.The novel is written as a series of extremely close-up character studies where each character’s weaknesses (but few strengths) are emphasized and thus generate little reader empathy. These close-ups invariably introduce a shocking note, or end on one, but are then separated by sweeping passages of time that leave the shock unexplored and unresolved. The text is mostly big blocks of narrative rather than scenes, composed of sentences that wander off and back in elaborate figure eights. For example, from opening the book to a random page: “And so on Friday morning she decided that before she called the woman, she should make a complete to-do list, so as to feel a bit more in control of her time, and after completing said list she was relieved to see that there were any number of tasks that she could, and should, tick off before picking up the phone, errands that absolutely needed to be run before the weekend, such as having her hair trimmed, and picking up some new clothing, and getting a facial.”Though written in homage to Mary McCarthy’s The Group (which I’m now compelled to take a look at), none of the characters here are the trailblazers I imagine the feminists in The Group to be. Leisurely readers will find A Fortunate Age to be quite an interesting book in an intellectual, sociology-study sort of way. But it’s not an emotionally engaging or satisfyingly plotted story.
    • 2/5
      I got this book through the Barnes and Noble Book Club and really thought I was going to enjoy it. I'm the right age and education level to blend right in with these characters, and yet I felt not one ounce of connection to any of them. The book was long and frequently tedious, and characters veered off on major life diversions with never a hint of the underlying motivations. I was extremely disappointed with this novel and didn't feel the narrative spoke to me at all. These characters seemed to revel in immaturity, and the endless posing was exhausting to read. I felt like every character was a negative stereotype of one age or another, and they therefore never rang true to me. I had a really hard time with this book; the more I read, the less I liked it and the less connection I felt to the characters. I believe that Lil's wedding should have marked the transition to maturity, but none of these characters ever seem to actually mature. This is my generation, and I would hate to think that any of my friends resembled these folks...I definitely found the characters mired in perpetual adolescence, and apparently unable to recognize that fact. Getting married and having babies doesn't make you an adult, and I feel these characters were all hiding their immaturity behind the trappings of adulthood. The ending was rushed despite my belief that the book is way too long. My constant feeling while reading was that we were missing too much- too many decisions and actions without any explanations. I think that helped contribute to my feelings of separation from the characters. I couldn't even summon up any sympathy for Lil when she died, and can't see how these people can be considered a group of "friends" given how they act toward one another.
    • 3/5
      I finished this book several weeks ago and have delayed writing my review because I wanted to see if my reaction to this story changed any over time. Nope. This book is a huge undertaking (both from the author's point of view and the reader's). The story follows a group of college friends as they leave college face the real world. The author writes this epic from the point of view of 5 of the 6 members of the group. The writing is good, the flow of the story is the ultimate problem. More than a few of the characters are largely unlikeable, but just when the reader starts to feel a connection or even an interest in the character, the chapter ends and we're off on another entirely different character and sometimes an entirely different year. Sometimes the loose ends get tied up, sometimes not, leaving huge gaps in the story flow that keeps the reader feeling like they are jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone across the river of this story. Perhaps this book would have been more effective as a collection of related short stories instead of a mildly cohesive narrative.
    • 3/5
      The book follows a group of friends from Oberlin through the morass of their daily lives, by looking at the group of friends one at a time, one chapter at a time. The book is well-written, hence my 3-star rating, and I'm sure it has an audience but I'm not it. I pretty much hated every single character and was annoyed with how they related to one another within the group. I had to force myself to finish it. I am not a fan of the whiny, misunderstood, lazy Gen X-er spirit portrayed here. As a Gen-Xer myself, I feel like I know these people and their ilk and they annoy me in real life. Why would I want to read about them too? It did not help the book's cause for me.I also had a problem with this author's portrayal of New York as one of the characters in the book. I think it is fine to do that if you make the city relevant for everyone. I live in Chicago, so even though it took me a while to catch on to what she was saying about a particular area, eventually I did identify with the neighborhoods the author describes as similar to some from here (even if I don't know the specific New York area she might be talking about). But, it annoyed me to think that people outside of cities would be at a loss to "get" a whole character in the book, even if that character is a city.I won't be recommending this to anyone.
    • 3/5
      This book is a fairly good story. The characters are interesting-very realistic in the mix of flaws and good points. One issue I had with the characters was that early on, I felt like I was constantly having to check the back cover to remind myself of who was who. It gets confusing with the jumping from character to character, but overall it is a good read.
    • 3/5
      "A Fortunate Age" follows the lives of a group of college friends from the 90s, the swell and burst of the dot-com bubble, through September 11th and the aftermath. We watch the characters struggle with launching careers, relationships, and families, while trying to find their own identity in a changing world. The novel itself is interesting, with its various plotlines and inter-connected stories, but often inconsistent particularly with its characters. One character started out with a certain mindset, and changed drastically by the end of the novel-- which happens, of course, with novels, but the problem here is that the transformation is never really explained and therefore, seems a bit false and jarring. Large parts of the timeline were skipped as the plot jumped from character to character, with a brief few sentences to catch the reader up. This allowed the book to cover a large amount of time and several characters, but at the cost of character development. At the same time, there were long stretches of narrative that could have been cut with no loss to the story-- for example, the pages of description of the music industry in the middle of the story of one character who was a struggling musician. This is not to say the book isn't worthwhile-- the plotlines were interesting enough to keep me reading, and in the second half of the book, the characters felt more complex and interesting. But a bit more consistency and balance would have made a world of difference.