The Dangerous Age

by Annette Williams Jaffee

The author of two exuberantly praised novels, Annette Williams Jaffee returns with a wise and sensual tale about pursuing the one great passion of our lives, not in our youth, but at that last dangerous moment when everything we own and everyone we love is at risk. The Millers are the envy of all who know them, a 'successful' couple on the verge of the best years of their lives. Suzanne's first book is enjoying national attention while Barry can write his own ticket to teach at any law school in the country. But a spate of recent deaths and the absence of her children, away at college, force Suzanne to confront the fact that her marriage is cold and empty. When Suzanne meets Robert Parrish, a silver-haired banker from East Texas with a talent for real friendship with a woman and an appetite for sensual pleasure-suppressed for years in his own straight-laced marriage-she must decide between the secure life she chose after the shameful ending of her first, youthful love affair or the disdain of her children, the loss of friends and the financial uncertainty awaiting a woman who uproots her life in pursuit of the true intimacy she has long denied herself. With rare insight, keen social satire and some of the most touchingly rendered erotic scenes in recent memory, The Dangerous Age is above all a story about seizing ecstasy in our livesregardless of age, in spite of the consequences. "Set aside a block of uninterrupted time to read Jaffee's new novel... Her writing makes the reader feel everything, with the result being that this is a book that refuses to be put down. A touching and absorbing story that lingers long after the final page has been read; highly recommended."- Library Journal (starred review) "The pages turn themselves."- Los Angeles Times Book Review "How glorious to give oneself up to a great late-in-life passion."- New York Times Book Review Annette Williams Jaffee is the author of Adult Education (Leapfrog) and Recent History (Putnam). She lives on the Delaware River in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

179 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Rachel Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, perhaps in a "there but for the grace of God go I" sense.

I loved the entire first half, then there was about 10 pages of discomfitingly crappy (& creepy even) sex. I think it was intentional; I think it was supposed to represent something about the nature of this affair the protagonist is having, but that knocked it down from five stars to four for me.

I feel like in general, it could've used a couple more passes of editing. Not only were there little copyediting errors like homophone mixups, but the ambitious nature of the structure could've been honed to an even sharper point.

I liked it, and I will read more of this author's books because I did enjoy so much about the first half of it. It's not for everyone, and it's very much a novel of its time; but I don't think it deserves the low rating that it has on here, presumably because so few people have read and rated it.

[Lanette Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book when I found myself in the same position as the main character, a women's studies professor caught in a good marriage that leaves her sensually unsatisfied. I remember that reading it felt like a delicious fever dream of passion. I don't remember how the story ended but I am giving it five stars based purely on the fact that I was sensually haunted by the writing. At the time that I read it, I wrote down whole passages that I found wildly arousing, some of which I will share here now, as I just stumbled upon the old document that contained them:

A time without weather; they are hidden out, comfy, in love, learning about each other’s needs and desires like explorers on a Polar mission… He serves her tenderly, tears off pieces of bread, feeds her bits of food as if she is his child, his patient, his prisoner….
He holds her and calls her names she could not have imagined: his bunny, his little love, his lollipop. “Oh baby,” he says, just before sleep, “put that beautiful ass next to me…”

She awakens suddenly in the middle of the night, unsure of where she is…But now his eyes open slightly and she is home, and her heart leaps that he will roll over and lift her slightly to get his arms around her, and push her against his knee, and she will begin to rub against it. “Oh honey,” he murmurs, half asleep, “your little motor’s roaring.” “I can’t help it,” she whispers, pressing his knee between her bare thighs. His big hands enfold a thigh each… He murmurs promises of sex – sucking, fucking – he says he will drink his morning coffee while she sucks his cock. She asks him to rest his head on her pussy and stroke the insides of her thighs…

She loves the way his voice changes as he begins: lowers, softens, his voice strokes her at the same time as his hands begin their descent, and she is lost in the wilderness of her own needs, needs created by him, choreographed by him, satisfied only by him.

During the day, she thinks of his hands touching her, finding their own true place, remembers as his fingers spread apart the soft hairs on her lips, her gown lifting above her head as he caresses her breasts, nipples. “Don’t get my pajamas wet, honey,” he says and she moans and moves. “Oh baby,” he says, “get them wet, spread it all over me,” and she presses against him. “Am I wet?” she always asks. “Am I wet enough?” “Oh honey,” he laughs, “what do you think? You’re dripping.”

She lives for night, the rest is a blur. … Nothing makes sense except night in this bed, lying next to this man. She prays he will awaken, that he will turn to her, touch her, talk to her, hold her, take her, press her, rub her, penetrate her, move her, love her. “Sit on me baby,” he says, “sit up on me.” And it begins…

He pulls her down to the edge of the bed so her legs hang over the side and he opens her legs, lifts her ass with both his hands, each holding up one cheek, and she lifts her back, arches it, and he finds her furry mouth with his smooth one, his tongue.

He whispers in her ear, “Hold tight, baby, we’re going to roll over now,” but by then she needs to hear nothing, can hear nothing. She knows when he presses into her, the way his shoulders move against her, that they are rolling. He protects her head with his cupped hand. Then he is above her, sinking into her…

He tells her to call him (a certain name) and it is as if he has struck her. She is breathless with his knowledge of her, threatened by it, so she doesn’t dare call him that for weeks until one night she rides high on him, the rain pounding the skylight above his bed, and she can’t stand it and whispers for permission.

She understands everything now, she is completely aware. He has taught her everything; he taught her to look, to watch his face and see the pleasure she was giving him. The pleasure a woman gives a man, she never understood before. The scales fall from her eyes like in fairy tales… knowledge is hers at last.

That night, he tells her how it feels to make love to her. He sits in a stuffed armchair near the window smoking while she lies in bed with a book in her lap, her reading glasses on, as he describes slowly, quietly, exactly how it feels: when he is on top of her, when she is on top of him, when he enters from behind, when he is in her mouth, and the angles of it: more forward, more back, above, on the side.

He is guiding her – that is what she feels in bed with him – he is a strong gentle guide to her own wicked pleasure, wicked only in the sense that her desire for him is so deep it is insatiable.

[Robyn Owens · Rating 3 out of 5]

A middle-aged woman leaves her husband of twenty-five years for a romance like she’s never known with Robert, a man she meets in her exercise class. She buys a run down farmhouse in the country and begins living the life she’s always dreamed of. Sensitive and realistic drama of growing older and reaching for a last chance at happiness.

[Molly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just never liked this protagonist, she was just a little too into her kids and lover, too ordinary and uninspiring. I was promised late age sexy awakening and I did not get it. Maybe I should see what old Catherine M is up too.. This character doesn't change throughout the upheavals in her life. Basically, she leaves her one dimensional husband/ job as a mediocre English teacher to pork a guy from her dance class. They have some sex, travel a while, then move on. Banal book, banal writing. I could not help but think that if I have an affair in my fifties it will be soooo much cooler. Too bad I read it right after the Painted Veil, which really overshadowed anything I might read afterward...

[Leesteffy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for every man--to know what a woman over 40 really wants. :-)

[Ann Carol Lamb Girotto · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too predictable.

[Selena · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kinda boring.