Joanna Rakoff’s debut – published here in the UK for the first time, following the success of her memoir My Salinger Year – is a collective coming-of-age story that follows the lives of six friends; Oberlin graduates negotiating life and love in New York in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Rakoff acknowledges the debt she owes to Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group, though the similarities are only skin-deep since A Fortunate Age lacks the politics of McCarthy’s classic text. Indeed, the lives of Rakoff’s characters are by and large predictably dull, as youthful dreams and ambitions quickly give way to depressingly traditional benchmarks of success and happiness: marriage, motherhood and financial stability (mostly due to successful husbands).
Despite being overly long – “sprawling” isn’t a word most cover blurbs employ in such positive terms – it’s pleasantly readable. I just felt like I’d heard it all before.
A Fortunate Age is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99). Click here to order it for £12.99
