Surrender, Dorothy is occasionally interesting, but not truly engaging. It’s a fictional study of the affects of death on those left behind, and it asks questions such as “Who has the right to mourn?” Sometimes the author has an interesting insight, but just as often her observations don’t seem very real.

Sara Swerdlow is the type of woman everyone loves. She’s beautiful and smart, and she sleeps with all the hottest men. For years, she and three college friends have rented a beach house together in the Hamptons. One friend is a gay man, an the other two are married to each other. The summer that Sara is thirty, she arrives at the beach house, goes out to buy ice cream, and dies in a car accident.

The book is about the reactions that Sara’s friends and family have to her death. Adam, the man who is gay, has been Sara’s best friend for years, and her death hits him very hard. He is already at a place in his life where he feels the need to prove himself; he’s a playwright whose first play was a huge hit, and he’s trying to write a second. Maddie and Peter, Sara’s married friends, also feel devastated by her death, which seems to magnify all the problems they have been having in their marriage since the birth of their first child. Shortly after Sara’s death, her mother Natalie arrives at the cottage, and Adam invites her to stay. There they spend the rest of the month coming to terms with Sara’s death.

Surrender, Dorothy is a quick read, and some parts are insightful. Often the characters are funny, and occasionally they have a conversation that seems very real (my favorite was one they have in the beginning about public notaries). However, Wolitzer sometimes misses the mark in a big way. At one point, Adam’s lover is reminiscing about his life, and he remembers the good old days when he could just sleep with anyone he wanted to without worrying about AIDS. Only Adam’s lover is younger then thirty; he never would have experienced those good old days.

The characters themselves are something of a mixed bag. Natalie and Peter are probably the most sympathetic. You can’t help but feel terrible for Natalie’s loss, and Peter is a nice guy who makes some mistakes but still comes across as a likable character. Interestingly, the discussion guide at the back of the book indicated that I was supposed to like him less than the others. Go figure. The weak links in the chain are Maddie and Sara. Maddie’s behavior is often hard to believe – she supposedly loves Peter, but she treats him very poorly. She also obsesses about her child in a way that seems odd for an educated woman. Sara was a bigger problem. I wanted to like her – after all, everyone else did. But she just seemed to selfish and rootless to me that I had trouble getting interested in her life, let alone the ramifications of her death .

This is another book aimed at book clubs and discussion groups, and there is an interview with the author and several discussion questions in the back. While I enjoy literary fiction now and then, I only recommend the best of the best to my book club. Surrender, Dorothy has its moments, but it’s not “best of the best.” If you are looking for a riveting literary read, I’d encourage you to try one of my favorites from this year – Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.