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    Sudden Rain
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    Sudden Rain
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    Sudden Rain
    Ebook584 pages8 hours

    Sudden Rain

    By Maritta Wolff

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    In 1972, in the suburbs around L.A., traditional housewives in their 30s and 40s are starting to ask whether they are satisfied by their everyday lives; meanwhile, a young woman in her early 20s feels paralyzed by her options. The story centers around five middle-class L.A. couples of three different generations and the ways in which their relationships and home lives are affected by the trends (specifically the rise in divorce and feminism) of the time. Maritta Wolff's moving, compelling novel takes place in one stormy L.A. weekend, as a literal fog of unrest blows into town, and alters these marriages forever.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster UK
    Release dateDec 11, 2012
    ISBN9781471105500
    Author

    Maritta Wolff

    Maritta Wolff was born in 1918 in Michigan. Whistle Stop, her first novel, won the Avery Hopwood Award in 1940. A runaway bestseller, the book was also printed as a special Armed Forces edition for American troops during World War II. Whistle Stop was made into a feature film in 1946, starring Ava Gardner. In the next two decades, Ms. Wolff authored more than five novels, but she hid her final, unpublished manuscript in her refrigerator until her death in 2002. Rediscovered, that novel, Sudden Rain, is available from Scribner.

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    Reviews for Sudden Rain

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    • 4/5
      The kind of had the feel of an Afterschool Special for disenchanted adults—it read almost like a TV movie or radio play. But she really did capture the tone of the time—not quite the entire zeitgeist, but a kind of two-dimensional melange of conversations and cultural artifacts and these stage setlike places that end up coming together in this very oddly evocative portrait of what I think of as my parents’ and siblings’ generation. It reminded me a bit of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, if the women had all moved to the West Coast and become totally disillusioned—I don’t think Wolff has the degree of control McCarthy does, but she does understatement well. Maybe a little too well in places, but she makes her point. And the end is really dark in a rewarding way, which keeps the book from falling completely into trite social novel territory. It definitely dabbles there... but it was fun in a kind of confectionery way.
    • 2/5
      I did not like this book. It was very dated ... initially I thought I was reading a parody ... but realised too late, that it was just a very dated story. There were no light and shades, just a blunt instrument telling the stories of very unempowered woman and umrecontructed men.
    • 3/5
      It's a shame this book was left as a manuscript in a refrigerator for 30 years, because it would have been much more relevant to read in the 1970s than when it was published in the early 2000s. It's a story of lots of relationships, none of which is really working. Most of these are marriages and 'affairs'. I suppose the main thesis of the book is that for the vast majority of people their major relationships have substantial, even fatal, flaws. In some cases the relationships do die, but in others they linger on in living death. That's a good line to write about, but none of the characters attracted me or even made me feel at all sympathetic to their cause. They all seemed like people I'd cross the street to avoid. Nonetheless I did complete all 400 pages, so it must have had something going for it. I guess it was the appeal of seeing where the situations ended up. The kind of novel you might read to occupy yourself on a long train trip, but then you're quite happy to throw the book in the rubbish bin when you get to the end.