Product Description

For years, Sara Swerdlow was transported by an unfettered sense of immortality. Floating along on loving friendships and the adoration of her mother, Natalie, Sara's notion of death was entirely alien to her existence. But when a summer night's drive out for ice cream ends in tragedy, thirty-year-old Sara -- "held aloft and shimmering for years" -- finally lands.

Mining the intricate relationship between love and mourning, acclaimed novelist Meg Wolitzer explores a single, overriding question: who, finally, "owns" the excruciating loss of this young woman -- her mother or her closest friends? Depicting the aftermath of Sara's shocking death with piercing humor and shattering realism, Surrender, Dorothy is the luminously thoughtful, deeply moving exploration of what it is to be a mother and a friend, and, above all, what it takes to heal from unthinkable loss.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #823317 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
Sara Swerdlow and Adam Langer are in many ways the ideal Manhattan pair. Their relationship is unvexed by the strains of sexual attraction, since both prefer men, and has even survived Adam's huge early success as "the gay Neil Simon." This couple, after all, can commiserate about lovers, talk about their favorite types, and ponder "the puzzlingly popular aesthetic of boxer shorts, which transformed all men into their uncles." Each August, along with their married friends Maddy and Peter, they rent the perfect Long Island wreck, complete with impossible landlady. Now that they're all 30, each is clinging to the last vestiges of youth--and a little concerned that Maddy and Peter's baby, not to mention Adam's new boyfriend, will alter the chemistry. But what no one can possibly know is that an accident will put Sara entirely out of the picture and bring her grieving, eccentric mother into it.

Killing off her ostensible heroine so early in Surrender, Dorothy may initially seem a bizarre undertaking, since Meg Wolitzer's fans would be more than content with her take on the foursome's summer holiday. The author, let's recall, is an expert social observer, and can turn a divinely comic phrase in her sleep. But in her fifth novel Wolitzer is aiming for more, and her expertly controlled scenes slide from charming farce to deeper melancholy. Set in a temporary summer rental, Surrender, Dorothy is really about the permanence of loss and revelation. --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly
Each of Wolitzer's novels (Friends for Life, etc.) has demonstrated this young writer's growing grasp of narrative technique. Here, her seamless prose and light touch animates an exquisitely wrought story about the sudden death of a charming 30-year-old woman. Despite the tragic situation, readers will be intrigued, even delighted, with the unfettered honesty and wry humor pervading the grieving process that Wolitzer describes. Sara Swerdlow is "pretty, but not vacant," smart rather than brilliant, uncomplicated, easy-to-take, beloved; she dies in a car crash at the end of the first chapter, at the onset of a summer vacation with friends. Sara's mother, the heartbreakingly rendered Natalie, is devastated by her only child's death. (Mother and daughter were extremely close; "Surrender, Dorothy," they would say to each other on the phone as a signal to tell all.) She cannot face a funeral or the weeping friends, and arranges a private burial. But it isn't long before Natalie is on her way to the summer house where Sara and her friends always spent the month of August. Already at the beach house are Sara's best friend, Adam, a successful young playwright dubbed "the gay Neil Simon" by the media; his companion, Shawn; and Maddy and Peter, Sara's long-married friends who have just had their first baby. Natalie takes Sara's room and for a few weeks inhabits her daughter's life. She comes to know Adam, acts as a stand-in mother for needy Shawn and finds herself attracted to Peter, setting off a crisis as she inadvertently reveals to Maddy one of Sara's more troubling secrets. Wolitzer enchants with wholly realized characters and a sly narrative voice that floats just above the angst and searing grief of Sara's loved ones. The password phrase "Surrender, Dorothy" takes on a new meaning for the bereft mother in a fitting, radiantly understated conclusion. (Apr.) FYI: Film rights optioned by Showtime Channel/Tribeca Films.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Wolitzer, daughter of Hilma, is a prolific writer of novels (Friends for Life, LJ 3/15/94) and children's books; here she announces her themes early on as three Wesleyan alumsAPeter, Maddy, and AdamAreact to the sudden death of a beautiful and beloved fourth, Sara. The four had planned to share an August beach house rental. Now, Adam's lover, Shawn, takes her place, the only one not part of the decade-long hermetically sealed group until Sara's death brings them her distraught mother, Natalie. Natalie briefly becomes a mother to the othersAwith varying results, as in most families. Wolitzer's writing is unadorned and direct; the relationships she dissects are neither. Peter and Maddy, relative newlyweds with a baby, attend to their faltering marriage; Adam tries to distinguish love (found with Sara) from sex with Shawn; and Natalie begins to heal with the help of a childhood friend. The title comes from a mother-daughter telephone code. For most fiction collections.
-AJudith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Great summer read
This is the first book I've read by Meg Wolitzer, and overall, I enjoyed it. The plot brings three just-turned-thirty friends into close and prolonged contact with the 50-something mother of their recently deceased friend. Wolitzer is able to pull this off because she obviously likes all of her characters, their various flaws notwithstanding. She also has the type of sense of humor that allows her to ligthen things up when emotions and events threaten to drag things down too much. The strongest character is the Mother, Natalie, who is one of the more appealing baby boomers in recent fiction, and by no means a mere caricature. My only objection is that several secondary characters are not as clearly drawn as the main ones. But in fairness to Wolitzer, in most novels the reader would not even care about knowing more about such relatively minor characters, and it's only her gift for making you care that makes this an issue at all.

Tiresome tale of one-dimensional characters
As a fan of Meg Wolitzer, having loved her other works, I looked forward eagerly to SURRENDER,DOROTHY. Regretfully, I was disappointed. The book takes place over a period of one month, August, as a group of thirty-year-old friends gathers for their annual time in the Hamptons. Although Sara is a doctoral candidate in Japanese history at Columbia, Adam a playwright, Maddy a lawyer, Maddy's husband Peter a teacher, they continue to rent the same filthy run-down hovel they've been renting for years. (Dorm life dies hard.) Horribly, Sara dies in a car accident as she and Adam are on the way to buy ice cream. The rest of the book and the month are attempts by the friends and Natalie, the dead woman's mother, (who inexplicably arrives to spend the time almost in her daughter's place) to come to grips with and cope with the tragedy. That this woman, who refused to allow these friends of many years' standing to attend her daughter's funeral, now feels a need to mingle with them is a trifle far-fetched. Throughout the month, we see how Sara has been thought of as the best friend of both Maddy and Adam. What is most peculiar is not that Sara and Natalie are close friends, but that their relationship is so all-consuming that every detail of their lives is shared - Every bit of each other's life is given up whole to the other - every day. The twisted irony of Sara's having thought at summer's beginning, that she would spend this August trying to disengage from her obsessive relationship with her mother and her mother's asking a young Japanese surfer to translate Sara's notebook and stumbling over "I love her, but sometimes I want her to leave me the hell alone. I mean, enough is enough" are the two most poignant moments in the book. Natalie is real, trying to accept the horrific fact of her child's death; no more will they say "Surrender, Dorothy" at the beginning of each telephone conversation, remembered from a shared passion with THE WIZARD OF OZ. The friends, however, are a trio of self-absorbed superannuated adolescents who, although pushed into the adult world a week early by the house owner's early return (Symbolism here?) don't have a clue.

Blah......
What a bunch of adolescents. All pretty self-serving. And dissappointing. I don't think friendship is too awfully deep when you screw around with your best friend's husband. Kind of a book about 30 year olds not wanting to grow up - forget the fact that their dear friend has died. And talk about a suffocating mother....YIKES! This book is mediocre at best.