num_pages: 224
description: It's August in New York City, and 30-year-old Sara Swerdlow is headed to Long Island, where she and her best friends aim to while away their days dissecting each other's love lives, careers, and the rundown condition of the cottage they've faithfully rented since college. A graduate student in Japanese studies at Columbia University, Sara is beautiful, charming, and stubbornly single, committed more to her soul mates than to even the idea of marriage. But turning 30 is starting to eat away at that nonchalance, casting self-doubt over a woman who until recently has thought herself "held aloft and shimmering." Back in the cradle of what amounts to no more than a summer shack, she'll sort herself out. She'll reconnect to her best friend, Adam Langer, the "gay Neil Simon," who loves her more than any boyfriend ever has. In August, she will reexamine her ties to her mother, Natalie, who opens every phone conversation with the same password, "Surrender, Dorothy." This summer, Sara will surrender to no one and nothing but her old best friends and this life she's still busy trying to figure out. Like Dorothy in  The Wizard of OZ , however, Sara has a home to get back to. But it isn't the one she imagines, the one carved out of her time-tested bond to Adam and their other Wesleyan friends, Maddy and Peter and their new baby, Duncan. It isn't even going home to Natalie, who divorced Sara's father before Sara even knew him. Her destination is spelled out in the balmy sky overhead like the wicked witch's trail of smoke over Oz. Sara's fate is to die this summer and in death take onthecentral role in her pals' remaining summer weeks.  In her emotionally fine-tuned and thoughtfully paced new novel, Surrender, Dorothy  , Meg Wolitzer (daughter of author Hilma Wolitzer) weaves a seamless tale that in its entirety reveals how one person can so uniquely bind other people to each other and to themselves. Surrender, Dorothy asks us to give up the idea that we amount to our individual lives alone and nothing more. Surrendering here means to forsake the doubt that meaningful connection  E. M. Forster's plea, "Only connect"  is impossible. Wolitzer's theme speaks death's words for us: Sara wasn't just anyone when she died, and a brutally quick car crash did not banish her from the living left behind. She was daughter, lover, best friend, and scholar, an important person simply because she worked hard, loved in earnest, and was loved back.  Surrender, Dorothy  works the fertile common ground of some other recent popular novels, too. One of the main strands of Sara's charmed life was her devotion to Adam, a theater wunderkind who won over Broadway with his very first play, "Take Us to Your Leader," a comedy about a Jewish family on Mars. Their friendship bestows on both of them the sense of well-being that each imagines to be an attribute of marriage. Adam especially wishes they could add physical attraction to the long list of pluses that marks their bond. Gay male/straight female almost-love stories are in vogue these days, putting  Surrender, Dorothy  in the same fine company as Stephen McCauley's novel-turned-film  The Object of My Affection T . (Expect  Surrender, Dorothy  to find its way to the screen, too.) And it shares with Ian McEwan's recent novel,  Amsterdam  , the intriguing idea of rendering a main character solely through other people's imagined and real past relations with her. Just as Molly Lane, the sexy photographer and shared lover of many a prominent Englishman, hovers over the men who vie for the right to her legacy in  Amsterdam  , Sara Swerdlow is the ghost that prompts each character's actions in ,  Surrender, Dorothy . Maddy retreats further and further from husband Peter in grief over Sara, complicating an already faltering marriage. Adam sees with striking clarity the faults of his lover and earnest fan, Shawn, an aspiring writer of musicals, as he compares Shawn's social awkwardness to Sara's uncanny ability to make him feel at home in his own skin. Finally, Natalie joins these four mourners in their cottage, trying to view from as many perspectives as possible this angel so swiftly gone from her, the daughter she loved perhaps too much if not too well. The surrogate family that is formed here brings to mind the world of Anne Tyler's novels as well as Ann Beattie's first novel,  Chilly Scenes of Winter . In a time of splintered marriages and greater social freedom, all these women authors suggest, we find our families where we can.  It seems 30-somethings are every bit as nostalgic as the boomers they're closing in on as the most formidable consumer force, and Surrender, Dorothy  is full of pop culture references to the '70s and '80s. One chapter is titled "Brown-Eyed Girl," the Van Morrison song playing on the radio when Sara's car crashes. The title itself is code to any generation that remembers Judy Garland's "big-girl" longing as its own, while "Surrender, Dorothy" as a phone greeting is Natalie's signal to Sara to give up the goods, tell her everything that happened. The mother-daughter bonding verges on merged identities. Wrapping that theme up in the cultural signature of Judy Garland puts  Surrender, Dorothy  squarely on the literary map with two other recent works, Oh, Jackie by Maudy Benz and  Judy Garland, Ginger Love  by Nicole Cooley. In Benz's book, a young girl comes of age sexually at the hands of a lecherous uncle and draws on her passion for Jackie Kennedy to steer her through the treacherous path of adolescence. In Judy Garland, Ginger Love  , two sisters take a road trip to their childhood home in order to divine truth from fantasy about their mother and her fanatical obsession with all things Judy. All of  Surrender, Dorothy's  odd cast, from the aging and now daughterless Natalie to the young and floundering Shawn, who barely knew Sara, discovers that with time and effort they, too, can go home again. Sara won't be there physically, but like airplane exhaust trailing the sky, she will remain only a memory away. Elizabeth Haas
language: English
title: Surrender, Dorothy
titlecomplete: Surrender, Dorothy
genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Drama, Chick Lit, Death, Literary Fiction, Relationships
ratings_count: 970
places: New York City, New York
publisher: Scribner