Sudden Rain

by Maritta Wolff

A vivid, gripping, emotional, and addictive read, Sudden Rain is also a rare and valuable portrait of an the long-lost final manuscript of Maritta Wolff—the author who, at the age of twenty-two, published what Sinclair Lewis deemed "the most important novel of the year," Whistle Stop (1941).

Hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "the Nixon-era precursor to Tom Perrotta's acclaimed novel, Little Children " this is a compelling drama that offers great insight into the nature of marriage -- both then and now.

Now that Sudden Rain has come out of its hiding place -- in Wolff's refrigerator, found after her death -- it remains gloriously frozen in time. Set in the fall of 1972, the novel perfectly captures, with expansive emotion and cinematic detail, the domestic trends of three generations of middle-class couples living in suburban Los Angeles. A brilliant portrait of its burgeoning era, Sudden Rain also offers striking cultural commentary on our everyday notions of love and marriage; individuality, equality, and community; and the promise and pursuit of the American Dream.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2005

About the author

Maritta Martin Wolff Stegman (December 25, 1918 – July 1, 2002) was an American author.

She was born on December 25, 1918 in born in Grass Lake, Jackson County, Michigan. She grew up on her grandparents' farm and attended a one-room country school. Wolff was a senior at the University of Michigan when she wrote a novel-length story for an English composition class that won the 1940 Avery Hopwood Award, a university prize for excellent writing, worth $1,000. Whistle Stop is a seamy tale of the Veeches, a shiftless family living in a whistle-stop town near Detroit. The novel, depicting incest, violence, and containing much more vulgar language than was usual at the time, was published the next year by Random House. That Wolff, a mere 22-year-old, was the author of so hard-boiled a novel gave her an instant notoriety, and Whistle Stop became an immediate best-seller, going into five editions and a special armed forces edition. Yet the book was not without literary merit, Sinclair Lewis calling it "the most important novel of the year."

Wolff's second novel, Night Shift, attracted more critical praise, especially for its dialog. Over the next 20 years she wrote four more best-selling novels. Always a private person who shunned publicity, Wolff, in 1972, refused her publisher's request to go on a promotional tour for a recently finished novel, Sudden Rain, and as a result the novel was never published during her lifetime. At that point she evidently ceased writing fiction.

While at the University of Michigan she had met and married a prolific young writer, Hubert Skidmore, who published six novels before he was 30. Skidmore died in a house fire in 1946. In 1947 Wolff married a costume jeweller, Leonard Stegman, by whom she had a son, Hugh Stegman.

After Wolff's death, the manuscript for Sudden Rain, which had been kept safely in her refrigerator for the last thirty years of her life, was published (along with re-issues of Whistle Stop and Night Shift) to much acclaim.

Reviews

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the late 60s and 70s for movies so thought that this book would capture my imagination, being written in that same time period. And almost as soon as I began reading, I could see this novel as a movie, with Glen Ford playing the Tom Fallon role, possibly Anne Bancroft playing his bitter wife Nedith... there'd be a spot in there for Jon Voight and possibly Jane Fonda. As an ensemble piece, there could be a role for Barbra Streisand, Shirley MacLaine, Burt Reynolds, Christopher Walken. Oh they're all there in my head, the cast of this novel being played by those fabulous 1970s actors, and in those fabulous 1970s houses, restaurants and cars.

This novel positively reeked of its time period. What with people smoking on aeroplanes (and everywhere else), standing in sweltering phone boxes to talk to one another, and a the dialogue being full of "fierce" and "fantastic" to describe everything from bushfires to getting high.

The story revolves around several people and couples, all on some kind of brink of despair, grief, or cataclysmic change in their lives. Those storylines are pretty interesting, even if the choices the characters make beggar belief at times. They're all a product of their time, all very existential and enlightened with a bit of Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People thrown in.

The storylines are all left open at the end of the novel (I actually wrote 'movie' there - that's how much this novel has turned into a film in my mind!) - nothing is resolved and we, the reader, are left to imagine how the various plot lines finish up. Does the divorce go through? Do they get back together? Do they ever discover who killed her?

Yes you read that right. In amongst the open and unfinished storylines, there's some wild cards in there, such as a murder in the canyons. Why this person is murdered remains a mystery, the entire sequence is well-told but bizarre.

And in amongst these wild encounters, including fabulous sex in grimey highway motels, there's the humdrum of everyday life that we encounter - coffee being made in the mornings, newspapers being picked up, children being dropped off, lunches being served, beds made.

This is a novel I found slightly difficult to rate because I really liked it on some levels, but on others I found it inane and silly. So it see-sawed between a 2 or even a 1, then a 4 and possibly even a 5 at moments. Which is why I came to settle on a 3. Highly enjoyable in places, stands up to some scrutiny of character and plot but not all, well placed in its historical context, but with some gaping holes.

[rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been enamored with Los Angeles for over a year now, as a liberal mishmash of cultures, a land of dry heat, good health, and wealth beyond imagination, and also the stomping grounds of the Manson family and Richard Ramirez, prone to exploding into wildfires. I can't help but romanticize California. I fell in love with every bit of it. That is the sole reason I was drawn to this book.

Sudden Rain sort of seems at first like it's about husbands and wives, and ex-husbands and ex-wives, bickering. Boring relationships rendered as you've seen them many many many times before. It reads like an aw, the damn hell shucks Mad Men: L.A. Style, with all of the attendant infidelity you'd imagine from that comparison, until at LEAST its halfway point.

But these people and this plot are more surprising than you might think. By the time everyone starts feeling the notorious Santa Ana winds, we have a grown man confessing to wanting to fuck his adult daughter (and a grown woman telling him that's totally natural), an implied future terrorist attack, and brutal murder that really comes out of nowhere and I realized that this book is not just a book about these people who happen to live in L.A., it's a book that signifies L.A. from its elemental core. It feels like a natural companion to Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, capturing the city at its most suburban, affluent and domestic - but also at its most animalistic and dangerous.

I know that not all of Maritta Wolff's books were set in southern California, but I suddenly feel like I've got to read Whistle Stop if this is what she's got up her sleeve.

[Pghbekka · Rating 4 out of 5]

To quote another reviewer: "I enjoyed this book very much, and I'm still not sure why."

There were parts of it that were really powerful. The end seemed to go strangely batshit, and feels sort of like an author who got tired of her characters. I like to think it's why she put it in the refrigerator.

[Justin HC · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much brilliance here - loved it. Major Ice Storm vibes. This came to me as a recommendation from Bret Easton Ellis, and that makes perfect sense - the LA milieu, the early 70s, California ennui, upper middle class domestic drama. For a novel written in and set around 1970, it was crazy prescient about climate change, environmental catastrophe, and the apocalyptic LA/CA fires! It also seemed concerned with “how we live today,” the impact of divorce, and the impossibility of men and women coming together in peaceful harmony. The characters exist in various states of meeting, falling, boredom, drifting, and cheating. She really captures how marriages trap these women and suck the brain out of both parties. The themes, ideas and vibes (smog walked so the airborne toxic event could run) were very pre Don DeLillo, but with a real pulse (not so bloodless as he can be).

This was a real find (and I mean really found in the author’s refrigerator after her death - even the mythology behind its creation and publication lend it a hidden gem/just for you alone as the reader quality). Would and will highly recommend, and want to read more from this author!!

[Erica · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read too much like a soap-opera. I got to page 87 and then decided there were just too many other worthy books out there.

[Margo Glynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book very much, and I'm still not sure why. But thirty years in a refrigerator didn't make it less appealing!

[Jennifer S. Brown]

Wow. This book is a time capsule and reading it was being transported back to the early 1970s. This novel is filled with miserable couples in L.A., all on the brink of collapse (and I should amend, both the couples and L.A. are on that brink).

This is a novel of relationships--between parent and child, between friends, between spouses. I found the book oddly gripping and yet plundering--how did she do that? It is so very, very dated--the roles of women, what divorce was like, smoking on airplanes, actually, smoking everywhere, current events--but it reads beautifully today. Most of the novel is dialogue, which occasionally is a little heavy handed, but put me in the moment.

The ending is striking and surprising and I won't dwell on it because I don't want to spoil it for those who will read, but I truly feel it is absolutely worth reading through, even if at points you flounder a bit, for that ending. A strange and remarkable novel.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathe, breath, aspiration. Wolff is at her best here. Her principle characters eddy, bob, and jam in a stream of human coincidence. I love her gift for dialogue and her precision in crafting characters who live and breathe. The ending of this novel took my breath away.

I love this novel as a period piece; set over four days in November 1972, it captures the zeitgeist of the era: afros, East Indian shirts, alcohol, phone booths, VWs, pot, Malibu, Topanga, convertibles, smoking on airplanes, and affairs (with their divorces). Any anthropologist would want to study this time capsule of a novel (esp. if one was born in 1972).

The sudden rain appears only once in the novel and that is early on. But the other sudden rain, the uncoupling of marriages, the mistakes in relationships, the ankle sprain, the missed opportunities, the affairs outside of marriages, and the fallacy that humans know what they want in life turns the novel into a deluge. She has her characters interact and interconnect in levels of separation that indicate to me that as much as I like to think I know my mate or my friends, no! never, I can never know anyone else completely. Because I will never know myself completely. But that is the beauty of reading her works (this is my third). They ground me. I feel wiser for having read them even though nothing happens--I retract that--something very big happens to Los Angeles but I cannot spoil it here (hint: know your Nathaniel West titles).

I am not sure why Wolff gave up on this novel and stored it in her freezer and refused to give it a book tour. Something must have broken in her about the publishing world, about art, about its commercialism, or something that I am missing. But I am glad her editors published it posthumously.

She is high in my pantheon of respected, intelligent, gifted, humane, talented writers: Updike, Roth, Hassler, Tyler, Atwood, Morrison, Silko, Alexie, Welch, Welty, McCullers, Irving...she is in my personal Hall of Fame.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

My friend DG has been recommending Wolff to me for about a year. She was his 2007 discovery. The lowdown on this forgotten novelist is that at age 22 she wrote this total blockbuster called Whistle Stop about a skanky family outside of Detroit. That was in 1941. She continued to produce novels for the next few decades after her death in 2002, a manuscript was found in her refrigerator. Sudden Rain is that manuscript.

Written in the early 1970s, Sudden Rain tells the story of half a dozen couples in and around Los Angeles, mostly unhappy and either divorced or well on their way. There's lots of drinking, smoking, an almost Flannery O'Connor-like act of violence, bad traffic and a spectacular fire. The dialogue crackles, the landscape is evocative, and I ate this up like a great big frosted cupcake.

Now I have to go back and read everything Wolff wrote.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intimate glimpse into the lives and conversations of several couples

Cinny and Jim
Peter and Killian
Tom and Needith and his mistress, Hallie
Nancy and Dave
Everyone appears happy on the surface, but underneath.... that's a different matter

the whole story is made up of individual conversations, overheard like we are voyeurs. Seemed to go on and on like a soap opera. No conclusions really. Did Tom go on the cruise? Did Peter and Killian get back together? And does anyone notice that Nan won't be coming home for dinner?

[Shiloh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t finish it. Threw it away.

[William Lashner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really an extraordinary novel. I found it exasperating and brilliant in equal measure. The conversations sometimes go on and on and you want to just scream, but then I have the same feeling when I read Dreiser, and yet, like Dreiser, the overall effect is exhilarating.

The novel opens in L.A. divorce court in the seventies, a strange empty box of marriage dissolutions, and then goes on to show the state of upper middle class white marriage in that specific era. It was written back then, actually, and so the details are just perfect. So much smoking. When Wolff goes out of her comfort zone the book seems more than a little forced -- she doesn't quite get hippies and the African American character is cringeworthy -- and some of the relationships are not as interesting as some others, but you so get a sense of her world and its stifling roles for both men and women.

Some of the scenes are just amazing, such as a reunion between a race car driver and his first wife that goes way off the rails, while others are just such a slice of life they are really refreshing. Finally, I have to say the ending, when the Santa Ana winds start blowing, is amazing. Everything goes off the rails in the exact right way as the world intrudes so rudely into the privileged lives of the characters. The final page, actually, is worth the whole book.

I'm not quite sure why I loved this novel. There is so much wrong with it and yet it is more alive than anything I've read in years. The backstory of the book seems to indicate that it wasn't strongly edited and that shows, and yet I can't help thinking that a conscientious editor would have taken out was is so vital in it. Strange.

But you can surely see that Wolff was a major talent.

[Kim Fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was telling an editor at the "Los Angeles Review of Books" about my love of 1970s L.A. novels, and he asked me if I'd read "Sudden Rain." I'd never heard of it. I could tell by the look on his face that he would not consider me a true aficionado of '70s L.A. lit until I'd read it. The book was written back in the 1970s, but the author tucked it in her freezer (she didn't want to do the promotion her publisher insisted on), and there it sat until her death.

"Sudden Rain" is about relationships: marriage (affairs and divorce in all their many stages) and friendship. It can sit confidently beside the books of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, but it has a different kind of substance to it (and arguably more substance), despite the seemingly surface-skimming prose. It is daring and ferocious in a certain way of 1970s novels written by women who were sick and tired of the world they'd grown up in. And it's of its time - there are a couple of scenes that could have been written only in the 1970s, that era of movies like "Blume in Love." The ending, in Nathaniel West fashion, is pure apocalyptic L.A. But original too. Wolff gets the freeways (without need to transform them into a metaphor for something else at every turn), and she is a master when it comes to dialogue - the moment the characters begin talking to one another, the reader is immersed.

[Eddie Catalina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished Sudden Rain this morning. I started it before the fires and finished it after. Reading very slowly. I am not sure if it is known when exactly it was written. I know the legend of it being found in her freezer after her death. My guess is it is set in the early 70's, post Manson killings, you can still smoke on airplanes... In any case, it's a great LA novel and like every good LA novel, it's about how close to the edge we are.

My toothache is bad today and I can't get into any kind of flow while writing but I suppose that is the kind of book this is, the style of this book. Short somewhat interconnected scenes. Disconnected scenes, like the city in a way, like the relationships in the book, all either breaking down or forming with a doomed inevitable breakdown on the horizon beyond the scope of this book. There are two ways to write novels about LA, either it's disconnected vignettes like this, The Informers, Crash, or the stoned unreliable narrator, like Play It As It Lays, Less Than Zero, Inherent vice, Lebowski.

This is a top tier LA novel. I was gripped from the opening in a divorce court, a perfect opening about disconnection and relationships on the brink, on the edge all the way through the conclusion with the Santa Ana's picking up.

[Lyn Dahlstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Wolff's Whistle Stop, a novel whose characters and dialogue I was blown away by, so I looked for other novels of this author to read, and just finished Sudden Rain.

Sudden Rain was also a page turner and absorbing. It was set in 1972 in L.A. (I was just starting UCLA then, after growing up in the San Fernando Valley), and the main characters were three generations of couples and their friends, in various states of togetherness or not, reflecting societal changes happening at the time.

All throughout the novel, Wolff captured the omnipresent feeling of that time and place. After having happily escaped to the sanity and welcome fresh air of Oregon rivers and mountains (now for something like 40 years), in reading this I was transported back to that undercurrent of L.A. rootlessness and restlessness, what was to me the artificiality of living without much real connection to the environment, at a time when relationships between men and women, and parents and children, were undergoing fundamental change. Somehow Wolff captured that while simply telling tales of how several people went through the period of just a few days.

[Matthew Harby Conforti · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/ Love the lore of this midcentury novel, only found posthumously in the author's refrigerator long after she had given up writing after two successful novels. It's a great midcentury snapshot of American culture in transition and opposition. At first I wondered if I'd be bored, but the writing was superior than a lot of what I've read lately. The pacing, the dialogue, the interiority -- it took me a little while to keep the many characters and their relations to each other straight, but when it clicked in it really took off.

I'd probably re-read and glean even more from it. Maritta Wolff was writing in the 60s about themes and topics authors still write about today-- this book was surely ahead of its time -- the ending with the California wildfires also felt eerily present-day. This was enthusiastically recommended by Bret Easton Ellis and I'm happy to have discovered it through him.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This actually wasn't a book I inherited from my mother but it should have been. And weirdly, the used copy I bought had a library check-out slip from a reader with my mother's tastes and from the town we lived in in the 70s. This book perfectly captures a moment in time she successful, well-educated white married people realized that their pact to strive together in generalized roles for the American dream left them profoundly unfulfilled.

[Shirley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't bother with this one. For a good story, read her first book, Whistle Stop. A slice of life in the decade she placed it. This one was a disappointment after that. There was not one character that I thought was genuine.

[Carleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heavy on details as many books from this era are. But fun to look at this period through the author’s keen eye. I don’t know that I would recommend it, but I am glad I read it. It was a somewhat fun read.

[Jamie Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved this book. I like the story of author behind it and how it was written and characters developed over the length of the book. I wish there was a little more to the ending but overall really enjoyed the book.

[Ian Carpenter]

DNF. Fantastic writing but there's an unguided sense of listening in to conversations that lost me pretty fast. The dialogue is great... but just not what I want right now. Going to check out her much lauded Whistle Stop.

[Marvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Egads, what a soap opera. Award winning drama queens (and kings). Philandering spouses, smoking, drinking, toss in an anticlimactic, nonsensical murder and you have What? Beats me. Don't know why I kept listening. Probably out of sheer disbelief at what I was listening to.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it till the end.

[Kelsey Grissom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t really know what this book was about but it was well-written and an entertaining read.

[Miriam Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it hard to get into and initially mixed up the characters but suddenly it took off and I wanted more.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lost little gem of LA 70's suburban noir. Probably 3.5 stars more than 4.

[Peter Karlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very slow character ensemble on divorce in the 70s that finally comes alive and morphs in Paul Thomas Anderson Magnolia territory.

[Sue Corbett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Saga style but set over just one weekend.good read

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gave "Sudden Rain" by Ms. Wolff 5 stars because it made me laugh, cry, and think. Also because it quite possibly has the best dialogue I've read in quite a few years. Her characters literally come alive. By the end of the book I could almost predict how they would react, I felt I knew them that well. None of them are perfect....some less so than others...but they each have genuine motives, concerns, and viewpoints. It's hard to choose a favorite passage, but Nancy and Cynny have a great "commentary on our culture" aka conversation over lunch one day.

Nancy smiled in spite of herself as they touched the glasses.
Then she said soberly, "Cynny, tell me something. You're everything I wish I were, you know. You're also the happiest woman I know who isn't a perfect vacuum between the ears, and you and Jim have the secure, forever kind of relationship that I hope for for Dave and me. You have something very strong and solid inside yourself. What is it?"
Cynny stared at her incredulously, then laughed. "only sheer terror, love! I've run on it for years."
"Cynny, I'm serious. Don't tease me."
Cynny looked at her searchingly for a moment and then at the glass in her hand. "Nan, what can I tell you?" she said at last. "You know, for years when I was a child, I believed that there must be a sort of magic formula for living that grown-ups kept secret, written on a piece of paper probably and locked away in a box. I honestly believed that when I grew up they'd give me the secret so that ever after I would know how to cope with everything and be a grown-up too. It was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, discovering that the box was empty."

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely not the superb writing craft I've come to know and love from reading Updike. Sudden Rain suffers from a lack of depth, the language, characters and action are somewhat superficial, there's an immaturity in the writing style, the author's intentions were good. Aimless details in descriptive passages, poor summary of action. However, the author shines at one-on-one dialogue -- this is where the characters' personalities really come out. And her understanding of love relationships is very keen, esp. that of Killian and Pete. The author's rendering of their self-sabotaged marriage and pseudo-reconciliation at the beach house is right on the money in terms of emotional content. In this book, everyone loves to get sauced, all the women are unsatisfied, all the men are disconnected and driven -- and while much of it may be based in reality, it's still life through a very narrow lens.