Surrender, Dorothy

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, Dorothyasks 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, Jackieby 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. InJudy 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