The Room-Mating Season

From The Critics

Jaffe, author of The Road Taken (2000) and After the Reunion (1985), presents another gentle, knowing, and compulsively readable coming-of-age story.

Publishers Weekly

Looking for Mr. Right and loving Mr. Wrong brings three women together in friendships that last four decades in this by-the-numbers saga by veteran Jaffe (Class Reunion, etc.). She follows the lives of three women-Leigh, Cady and Vanessa-who meet as ingenues in New York City, fresh out of college in 1963. The trio, plus a fourth roommate, Susan, share an Upper East Side townhouse. Leigh aspires to become a casting agent, Cady teaches high school English and Vanessa is an airline stewardess (aka a "vending machine on legs"). Susan, a mousy, slightly eccentric receptionist with a desperate air, is disliked by the other three, who eventually ask her to leave (the last straw is a case of possibly contagious warts that the hapless Susan develops). But on the weekend Susan is supposed to move out, she dies in an apparent suicide. Her death casts an intermittent pall over the next 40 years as Cady and Leigh experience life-altering romances with married men while Vanessa's surprise pregnancy finds her heading to the altar. Jaffe speeds through these decades; her portraits of the women as adults are hurried and superficial, and world events get cursory, cliched treatment ("It was late winter of 1964.... It was, and would be, a year of change. The new hot group, the Beatles, was singing their innocent hit, `I Want to Hold Your Hand'"). The breezy romances keep the pages turning, but Jaffe's fans may feel that she's working on autopilot. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Another women-through-the-decades drama from Jaffe (The Road Taken, 2000, etc.), this time based on a premise from a newspaper article she wrote in 1963. The original Herald-Tribune story chronicled the travails of single "girls" forced to share tiny, expensive Manhattan apartments while they held down low-paying jobs and hunted for husbands. The level of Jaffe’s inventiveness in her fictional elaboration can be judged by the fact that she recycles many of the article’s details. Leigh Owen, a 23-year-old secretary at "the powerful Star Management talent agency," can afford the outrageous $200 monthly rent on an Upper East Side one-bedroom apartment only if she gets three roommates. She recruits fellow Pembroke grad Cady Fineman, sexy stewardess Vanessa Preet, and dull doctor’s receptionist Susan Brown. Jaffe sketches her characters with broad strokes: Leigh is smart, self-possessed, ambitious; much-older Star partner David Graham encourages her to become an agent. Emotionally needy Cady teaches high-school English, stagnates in a long-term affair with a student’s father, Paul, and is always being bailed out of financial trouble by her mother. Vanessa is casually promiscuous. Susan is a dreary drag, and the other three don’t like her, though they’re guilt-ridden when it seems their hostility has driven her to suicide. Shortly thereafter, the remaining roommates go their separate ways. Pregnant Vanessa marries a lawyer she doesn’t love and relocates in California. Cady moves into a fancy apartment paid for by Paul, whom everyone but Cady realizes will never leave his wife. Leigh marries David, has perfect children and a perfect life. All stay in touch and also remain friends with CharlieRackley, a platonic pal from their roommate days who maintains his crush on Vanessa and eventually clears up the mystery of Susan’s death. It’s very stock stuff, but with the exception of some embarrassing scene-setting paragraphs ("The decade that was to be known as the ‘Me Decade’ had begun and people wanted it all"), Jaffe handles it adequately. For undemanding readers.