Rona Jaffe
This September, I was honored to receive a writing award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. I had never previously heard of Rona Jaffe (1931–2005) and was interested to learn that, unlike many philanthropists, she was a bestselling novelist. In the 1960s–70s, Jaffe’s popularity extended all the way to Ankara, where her readers included my own mother. My mother particularly remembered The Best of Everything, a novel about four single girls in New York, for its “humane” treatment of one of the girls going through her ex-boyfriend’s garbage: “not as if she’s a huge loser, but as if something very unfortunate happened to her.”
On reading The Best of Everything, I discovered that the abovementioned girl actually develops a single-minded obsession with this garbage, to the extent that she sits on the back stairs of his apartment every night, waiting for his maid to take out the trash and then scavenging it for traditional garbage-type items. From these items, she deduces the complexion, hair color, menstrual cycle, and name of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend.
Unfortunately, what the girl really wants to know about her successor is something different: “what she has that I didn’t have.” (This would be a solution to what Max Scheler has described as “the problem of the person”… imagine finding it in some guy’s garbage.)
She continues to pursue her garbage researches by night on the dark landing, until one night—spoiler alert—she falls down the stairs, and dies. My mother had no recollection of this denouement, which was, however, technically consistent with her memory that “something very unfortunate happened.”
Many things have changed in the 49 years since the publication of The Best of Everything. Nevertheless, while reading, I was struck by a certain “ring of truth,” which I’m pretty sure was produced by the novel itself, rather than by extratextual information (like the preface, in which Jaffe describes her experiences as a single girl in a New York publishing house).
I am practically always thinking about something or another, so it was no big deal for me to start thinking about the “ring of truth.” What are the formal techniques that suggest a documentary quality in literature (analogous to the use of a handheld camera in film)? The first thing I thought of was the juxtaposition of real and fabricated names (“Fabian Publications occupied five air-conditioned floors in one of the modern buildings in Radio City”). Then I thought: “Yes, but the main thing is really the unscripted-sounding conversations.” Then I thought, “Right, so what makes the conversations sound unscripted?” Then, remembering that I no longer get free health insurance for sitting around making such conjectures, I returned to a letter I was writing to the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic.
From her New York Times obituary, I read that Rona Jaffe herself was never married and left “no immediate survivors.” Even though marriage is the holy grail for the heroines of most of her sixteen books, she always “preferr[ed] to avoid what she once dismissively described as ‘the rat race to the altar.’” I found it moving that, instead of supporting her immediate survivors, Jaffe established a fund to help “emerging women writers.” Since 1995, the Foundation has awarded $750,000+ in grants.
Tags: comparative literature, Elif's mom