The Real Friendships of Novelist Rona Jaffe

My one peeve with the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards (click to see the just-released 2009 winners), is that, as is the case with most genuinely juicy writing grants, it's nomination-only. Drat!)
The Jaffe prize is one of the few offered exclusively to women, despite the vast contributions over the years of literary observers such as Emily Bronte, Marilyn French and Margaret Atwood. Designed specifically "to make writing time available and provide assistance for such specific purposes as child care, research and related travel costs," to the very helpful tune of $25,000, the honor has also been particularly attentive to the needs of young female poets -- an area in which, I can personally confirm, it is pretty hard to generate enough cash for a week's worth of groceries.

The award introduced me to many now-favorite authors, such as Eula Biss (do not miss this year's excellent book of essays on race and culture, "Notes From No Man's Land," or her brilliantly bizarre book of poetry, "The Balloonists"), as well as the indefatigable ZZ Packer, whose next book I anxiously await. I also recommend poet Erin Belieu, whose poem "On Being Fired Again" usefully put a name to an ailment I and many others suffer. ("Contagious lack of team spirit," in case you were wondering.)

But for the devoted Jaffe fan -- the one who's read everything from "The Best of Everything," the decadent and addictive novel of four girls starting out in publishing in New York that catapulted Jaffe to fame and fortune in 1958, to "Mazes and Monsters," the unintentionally comic 1981 novel on the dangers of role-playing games -- what's most interesting about the Rona Jaffe awards is how much its recipients' work differs from Jaffe's own.

Jaffe, who died in 2005, is the kind of writer the critical establishment reflexively dismissed even as she was embraced by readers. Certainly, her books immediately disqualify themselves from the realm of la-la-literature on several scores. More often than not, they are set against a sumptuous backdrop, like Harvard's then-segregated woman's school, Radcliffe of the '50s, or New York City's glittering chattering classes. The writing itself can seem pre-fustified. ("Class Reunion": "Oh, my, wasn't he the best-looking thing she'd ever seen! Tall and blond and sexy, with that classic profile, and that gorgeous jaw.") And the characters themselves are seemingly sketched in broad strokes, their personality traits applied as subtly as a gash of red lipstick.

But to assume readers are drawn in only by those Cambridge preppy cashmere coats, stints at the Ritz and suave editors-in-chief -- and to then dismiss Jaffe as trivial -- is to miss the point and power of her body of work entirely. Jaffe isn't simply the grandmother of frippy chick lit about career girls on the hunt for a man. Jaffe is the doyenne of a school of literature that gets surprisingly little play in the popular culture: books about friendships between women.

When we think of iconic feminist works in literature, we think of books like "Fear of Flying," "Heartburn," "The Bell Jar" or "Wifey," "Diary of a Mad Housewife," "Kinflicks" and (as an early feminism bibliomaniacal completist, I must include) "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen." In those works, the pros and cons of marriage and men in the main are heatedly dissected.

But the same decades also included Jaffe's "Class Reunion," Marilyn French's "The Women's Room" (also about a foursome at Radcliffe/Harvard), Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls," Marge Piercy's "Small Changes" and "Braided Lives," and Mary McCarthy's "The Group." (My younger and very well-read agent once admitted to me she'd never heard of "The Group" -- necessitating an emergency Amazon gift purchase of that and "The Best of Everything.") Sure, these books are filled with men as well. But like the callers at a sorority house, they stand outside the main plot, ringing for dates, while all the action happens inside.

While I am thrilled that Jaffe's foundation supports a number of excellent writers, I was stumped when I tried to think of a modern-day Jaffe, until I realized that, ironically, even as books about groups of women pass into obscurity, they endure in popular culture. Take "Class Reunion," with its foursome at Radcliffe in the '50s. We have Annabel, the lusty, auburn-haired southerner; Daphne, the perfect WASP golden girl; Chris, the repressed intellectual; Emily, the shy, romantic dreamer.

We've met these people before, of course -- starting with Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" -- appearing in different guises everywhere from TV's "Golden Girls" to "Sex and the City" to the burlesque troops of the monumentally addictive "Real Housewives" franchise. The fractious group of friends is the corn syrup of women's entertainment -- delicious, looked-down-upon, but found in almost all successful concoctions. These entertainments all define women's progress, not against the men in their lives, but against each other.