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Public Affairs, Private Relations
Marika Wentworth, the president of an eminent public relations firm and the best friend of the First Lady, discovers new meaning in her life when she is drawn to Jonathon Scher, a wealthy international business tycoon
641 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
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August 7, 2015
I am enormously fond of this author's autobiographical work, but this, her only fiction novel, not so much.
Part of it is neophyte novelist's errors in pacing. The decor of nearly every room is described in fulsome, loving detail the vast majority of which is not need for the characterization or the plot. It's just the author rhapsodizing over her own taste.
Part of it is due to the lead character who I found more and more annoyingly smug, superior and self-satisfied. And part of it is for the plot, why is she so inept when it comes to managing the staff at her own company? And why is it such a shock to her that her fiancé's mother is upset about the fact that there won't be any grandchildren because the heroine is 44? (The fiancé is only 42 which in self-made billionaire terms is exactly when you marry a young wife to make babies.) For that matter, why isn't she herself worried about this?
Also, there's the matter of a very odd relationship with a young adult daughter, whose unemployed "Eurotrash" boyfriend leaches expensively off the two of them throughout the book. And who she urges to abstain from sex with because..well there is no compelling reason besides you could get AIDS.
Near the end of the book, she's taking a break from work at her great aunt's vacation home outside Gstaad Switzerland, as you do, when she hears a young man she's known very well was at deaths door, has finally succumbed. And she starts crying and saying, oh I wish I could have been there, over and over again. All I could think was what BS...she knew perfectly well he was dying, she is very wealthy, and she's already hopped on the Concorde for a flight earlier in the story. If she really wanted to be there, she easily could have been.
So, I'm really disliking this self centered woman who everyone else in the book thinks us so very wonderful - even the President and the First Lady adore her!
So, why does this book get any stars at all? Because it features a 44 year old female lead who is successful in business, who is a good parent, a great daughter, a civic volunteer, and who has female friends who she can talk to for hours in conversations that are not always centered on men or children.
In other words, an anomaly in many of the books of the time period it represents (published in 1990, but feels more like the 1970s.)
I can't tell you how reassuring the few books like this were for a young woman like I was back in 1990 crashing into glass ceilings and commonplace sexism.
Part of it is neophyte novelist's errors in pacing. The decor of nearly every room is described in fulsome, loving detail the vast majority of which is not need for the characterization or the plot. It's just the author rhapsodizing over her own taste.
Part of it is due to the lead character who I found more and more annoyingly smug, superior and self-satisfied. And part of it is for the plot, why is she so inept when it comes to managing the staff at her own company? And why is it such a shock to her that her fiancé's mother is upset about the fact that there won't be any grandchildren because the heroine is 44? (The fiancé is only 42 which in self-made billionaire terms is exactly when you marry a young wife to make babies.) For that matter, why isn't she herself worried about this?
Also, there's the matter of a very odd relationship with a young adult daughter, whose unemployed "Eurotrash" boyfriend leaches expensively off the two of them throughout the book. And who she urges to abstain from sex with because..well there is no compelling reason besides you could get AIDS.
Near the end of the book, she's taking a break from work at her great aunt's vacation home outside Gstaad Switzerland, as you do, when she hears a young man she's known very well was at deaths door, has finally succumbed. And she starts crying and saying, oh I wish I could have been there, over and over again. All I could think was what BS...she knew perfectly well he was dying, she is very wealthy, and she's already hopped on the Concorde for a flight earlier in the story. If she really wanted to be there, she easily could have been.
So, I'm really disliking this self centered woman who everyone else in the book thinks us so very wonderful - even the President and the First Lady adore her!
So, why does this book get any stars at all? Because it features a 44 year old female lead who is successful in business, who is a good parent, a great daughter, a civic volunteer, and who has female friends who she can talk to for hours in conversations that are not always centered on men or children.
In other words, an anomaly in many of the books of the time period it represents (published in 1990, but feels more like the 1970s.)
I can't tell you how reassuring the few books like this were for a young woman like I was back in 1990 crashing into glass ceilings and commonplace sexism.
Displaying 1 of 1 review