Sudden Rain: A Novel
by Maritta Wolff
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Book Summary Information
Author: Maritta WolffIntroduction: Margot Livesey
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-08-01
ISBN: 0743254856
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of Sudden Rain: A Novel
Book Review: "We're all on other marriages and divorces now. Isn't it fierce?"
Summary: 5 Stars
In what may be the consummate depiction of the early 1970s, Maritta Wolff recreates Los Angeles suburbia--its attitudes, values, concerns, and goals--or lack of them. Her rapier-sharp satire focuses on the shallow lifestyle, the self-indulgence, the disregard for the wider world and the environment, and the prescribed roles into which both the men and women force themselves. Following the lives of several families from three different generations--the twenty-somethings, those in their forties who have young children, and those who are within five or ten years of retirement--she makes the entire period come vibrantly alive, every detail perfectly rendered to create atmosphere and reveal lifestyle and mores.
Her characters range from the college junior who has already filed for divorce after just eight months of marriage (and who is now living with a revolutionary intent on overthrowing the government), to two men nearing sixty who suddenly find the loves of their lives (despite the fact that one or the other of them is married), and also include a depressed woman whose three children and all their activities cannot fill the void in her life or provide her with a sense of purpose or fulfillment. The characters, while shallow in their values and motivations, are fully drawn, making their complaints and the waste of their lives that much more poignant.
All the action takes place over a long, hot weekend in the summer, the dry air, blistering Santa Ana winds, and potential for forest fires symbolizing the arid lives of the characters, the passions and emotions by which they live, and the explosive actions which will change all their lives by the end of the weekend. Even in her conclusion, however, the author remains true to life--she does not tie up all the details, and she leaves many questions unanswered for the reader to ponder. The characters soldier on, dealing with their messes and the damage they inflict.
Drawing little attention to her "writing style," Wolff creates characters who perfectly represent suburban life in the early seventies, every conversation true to life, every action plausible and consistent with the character, and every flaw of this society and its people revealed for all the world to see. Sudden Rain holds up a mirror, and the reflection is not a pretty sight. n Mary Whipple
Summary of Sudden Rain: A Novel
A vivid, gripping, emotional, and addictive read, Sudden Rain is also a rare and valuable time capsule: the long-lost manuscript of Maritta Wolff -- the author who, at the age of twenty-two, published what Sinclair Lewis deemed "the most important novel of the year," Whistle Stop (1941).Now that Sudden Rain has come out of its hiding place -- in Wolff's refrigerator, found after her death -- it remains gloriously frozen in time. Set in the fall of 1972, the novel perfectly captures, with expansive emotion and cinematic detail, the domestic trends of three generations of middle-class couples living in suburban Los Angeles. A brilliant portrait of its burgeoning era, Sudden Rain also offers striking cultural commentary on our everyday notions of love and marriage; individuality, equality, and community; and the promise and pursuit of the American Dream.
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