Rating: 
Summary: An Undercurrent of Strangeness
Review: What was up with these girls? I kept comparing this book to The Best of Everything (which was much better, no question). There was the normal, level-headed girl (Caroline), the crazy-in-love girl (April), the obsessed and previously slutty girl (Gregg), the divorced girl who falls in love with a married man and ends up getting him(Barbara), and the girl who does what she is supposed to do (Mary Agnes).
The young women in this book are composites of the above characters - Leigh is level headed and does what she is supposed to do, and also gets a married man - she has a happy home and helps out her friends. Cady is obsessive AND crazy in love with a married man, and Vanessa is slutty. (The Susan character is basically a non-entity) This book also reminds me of some of the characters in The Last Chance - especially Vanessa's flings and her anorexic daughter.
In any case, this book does have its good points. It chronicles Cady's almost 40 year, on and off again affair with a married man. As nutty as this experience seems, I know that life can actually happen this way. She also doesn't pull any punches with Cady's demanding behavior while living with Leigh. However, I just didn't get Cady's obsession with monogrammed silverware.
Ms. Jaffe also allows her characters to confront aging and their loss of attractiveness to men, as well as begin to think about future deaths and illness. Leigh, at least, comes to realize that her friendships with Cady and Vanessa are the result of being roommates - if she met them later in life she probably would not like them at all.
The book starts off in a rather banal manner, and I didn't know if I could finish it. However, the writing did pick up, and held my interest. I don't think Ms. Jaffe is as good a writer in this book as she would have liked to have been. Her descriptions of the girls, the men, and the places they lived, were sketchy, and I never really got the feeling that I was there with them. The male characters were interchangeable and almost opaque. Leigh's situation (chance meeting with boss in bar who immediately promotes her, then marries her) seemed completely unauthentic. I also found it extremely unlikely that as a 25 year old stewardess, Vanessa could not figure out how or where to obtain an abortion (surely her fellow stewardesses, sleeping around as much as she, had required this service), and simply let herself be carried along into marriage against her desire to have as many men as possible. The whole Susan thing was out in left field. It's as though Ms. Jaffe wanted to say something, but just didn't quite know how to put it together in a way that the reader could get something out of it. I tried, and I think I partially succeeded.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: When I was much younger, I read the author's book "The Fame Game." At the time, I thought it was one of the best books I had ever read (probably because at 16, I hadn't read many really 'good' books). However, I continued to be a fan of Rona Jaffe's and read all of her subsequent books and was usually entertained with a good story and interesting characters.Unfortunately, The Room-Mating Season is neither a good story nor does it have compelling characters. By reading the synopsis, it seems that the book is about 4 girls coming of age in New York City in the early 60's and continuing with their lives through present day (a great premise). Actually, it is really about 3 of the women and one male friend. I found the lead female character, Cady Fineman, so pathetically needy, so filled with jealousy, so immature and unlikeable, that every time a chapter started about Cady, I wanted to skip it. What amazed me about all of the women in this book is how they so blithely had affairs with married men - and not only were they married men, but they were also much, much older married men (20 years older than the girls). It seems to me like Rona Jaffe has a fixation with older men and younger women. (And thinking back to "The Fame Game" it was also about a much older man having affairs with very young women.) Does she have a father/daughter complex? With the exception of Leigh, the most stable woman in the group, the other characters do not mature or grow wiser with age. They mourn the loss of their youth because they are not beautiful or desirable to men anymore. Cady ends up desperately trying to pick up younger men to have sex with and Vanessa, because she is no longer desirable to strangers in bars, decides to have an affair with the one man in her life who has always loved her (even though she has the depth of a pickle chip).
This book is so lightweight, it could fly away on a balloon. This book can be read over the course of a weekend and if I had read this book as a 16 year old, I probably would have liked it. More mature readers however, will probably be disappointed.
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