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Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Kingsburg Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | SCOTT JO Careers | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
New York in the late 1950s. A city, and a world, on the cusp of change . . .
Maggie Gleason is looking toward the future. Part of a midcentury wave of young women seeking new lives in New York City, Maggie works for legendary Port Authority public relations maven Lee K. Jaffe -- affectionately known to her loyal staff as Mrs. J. Having left Cleveland, Maggie has come to believe that she can write any story for herself that she imagines.
Pauline Moreau is running from the past -- and a shameful secret. She arrives in the city on the brink of despair, saddled with a young daughter who needs more love, attention, and resources than Pauline can ever hope to provide. Seeing that Pauline needs a helping hand, Mrs. J tasks Maggie with befriending, and looking after, Pauline.
As the old New York gives way to the new, and Mrs. J's dream of the world's largest skyscraper begins to rise from the streets of lower Manhattan, Pauline -- with the aid of Maggie and Mrs. J -- also remakes herself. But when she reignites the scandal that drove her to New York, none of their lives will ever be the same. Maggie must question everything she thought she knew about love, work, ambition, and family to discover the truth about the enigmatic, strong woman she thought she had rescued.
Careers for Women is a masterful novel about the difficulties of building a career, a dream, or a life -- and about the powerful small mercies of friendship and compassion.
Author Notes
Joanna Scott lives in Rochester, New York.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the late '50s, at the outset of the women's lib movement, a woman named Maggie Gleason goes to work for real-life figure Lee K. Jaffe, head of public relations for the New York Port Authority. She's an inspiration for the women who work for her, and when she offers the beautiful and brash Pauline Moreau a job, Pauline and Maggie become friends and Maggie comes to adore Pauline's developmentally-disabled daughter, Sonia. When Pauline goes missing, leaving Sonia behind, Maggie is desperate to get to the truth. As Maggie's investigation progresses, Pulitzer Prize finalist Scott (The Manikin) displays her considerable storytelling skills to chronicle the lives of the astonishingly resilient Pauline and her gentle, sweet-natured daughter Sonia, as well as Pauline's horrible treatment at the hands of the men in her life and her near constant struggle to provide for herself and Sonia. Sentimentality is mostly avoided, making the ultimate revelations even more tragic. Although Maggie mostly narrates, other dramas unfold throughout, such the poisoning of Native American land by an aluminum company called Alumacore, as well as Jaffe's role in selling the idea to build the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This finely drawn novel is memorable and rife with textured historical detail. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A Rona Jaffe-esque office drama mingles with an environmental morality tale la Barbara Kingsolver in Scott's latest (De Potter's Grand Tour, 2014, etc.).The Port of New York Authority's Office of Public Relations, where Mrs. Lee K. Jaffe supervises 11 "clerical girls" more interested in husbands than careers, recalls The Best of Everything, though its melodramatic complications are confined to one employee: unwed mother Pauline Moreau, rescued from prostitution and brought to the Port Authority by Mrs. J in 1964. The odyssey of Bob Whittaker, Pauline's former bossand her baby's fathermoves the novel into Animal Dreams territory; he runs an aluminum plant in upstate New York that is poisoning the land, animals, and people around it with toxic waste. The connection between the two plot strands is the World Trade Center, clad in aluminum from Whittaker's plant, and Mrs. J's pet project: "She loved, loved, loved a job that allowed her to spend her time turning dreams into reality!" It's blatantly ironic that Mrs. J, proud of a father who quit his job as a coal mine supervisor rather than cover up unsafe conditions, prides herself on work that involves sugarcoating the Port Authority's displacement of disgruntled locals. Whittaker's moral blind spots prove a lot more deadly, as the narrative ricochets around a half-century and yokes together a plethora of disparate elements. A catastrophic fire at the aluminum plant in 1988 brings closure to several storylines yet seems tonally at odds with the haunting final scene among the ghosts of 9/11 victims. The large cast of characters is sharply drawn, but no one gets enough sustained attention to command our emotional engagement; a number of collective scenes voiced by people we never meet again, from aluminum plant workers to World Trade Center protestors, reinforces the sense that this book needed to be longer to work out its potential. Plenty of interesting material that this talented author should have developed more fully. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Maggie, 21 years old and anxious to find her way in New York City in 1958, is awed and intimidated by Mrs. J, the exacting and determined head of the Port Authority's public-relations department. Never one to back down, Mrs. J intercedes when they encounter policemen abusing prostitutes, including Pauline, the single mother of a special-needs daughter. Maggie's and Pauline's stories soon intertwine in what begins as a clever and larky tale, all shimmers and sparks, and then evolves into a suspenseful drama of profound dimensions. MacArthur Fellow Scott (De Potter's Grand Tour, 2014), a novelist of wit and daring, creates fresh and compelling characters and nimbly spans decades as she delves into the struggles of women in a blatantly sexist world. On one track, she follows tough, funny, life-embracing Pauline and observant, generous, and steadfast Maggie in a tale of pluck, courage, and desperation culminating in Pauline's disappearance and Maggie's solving of the mystery. On the other, Scott exposes the human and environmental costs of greed and corruption at an upstate aluminum plant emitting toxic pollution, and in Manhattan, where the Port Authority enacts land grabs and dirty deals as its ambitions for a World Trade Center soar. Scott's dynamic and provocative novel offers arresting insights into moral dilemmas at the intersection of the personal and the societal.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BLACK DETROIT: A People's History of Self-Determination, by Herb Boyd. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Boyd weaves the lives of standout African-American figures into this history of the city, tracing its evolution from a French trading post to a symbol of decline. From the country's first black auto dealer to Michigan's first black obstetrician, characters who might have otherwise remained on history's sidelines are the heart of Boyd's history. GOODBYE, VITAMIN, by Rachel Khong. (Picador, $16.) In the wake of a breakup, Ruth - 30, adrift and heartbroken - returns home to care for her father, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. The novel takes the form of Ruth's diary over that year, resulting in a poignant and even darkly comic exploration of adulthood, relationships and memory. THE WRITTEN WORLD: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization, by Martin Puchner. (Random House, $20.) Puchner, an English professor at Harvard, makes the case for literature's all-importance to societies and the shape of humanity's history. His research has taken him to every continent, in the search for sacred and foundational texts, and spans centuries, from Mesopotamia to Cervantes to Harry Potter. SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE, by Sarah Schmidt. (Grove, $16.) Schmidt revisits the unsolved Fall River murders at the center of Lizzie Borden's life: In Massachusetts in 1892, Lizzie's father and stepmother were hacked to death. Schmidt imagines the lead-up to the grisly crime, and Lizzie's possible madness. Our reviewer, Patrick McGrath, called the novel "a lurid and original work of horror," which evokes "the disintegrating character of this sweltering, unhygienic and claustrophobic household of locked doors and repressed emotions." HUNGER: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) Reflecting on her life through the lens of her body, Gay engages with questions about desire, nourishment and protection. As Carina Chocano wrote here, the memoir reads like Gay's "victorious, if not frictionless, journey back to herself, back into her body, from the splitting off of trauma. Is the responsibility for her body really hers alone?" THE MISFORTUNE OF MARION PALM, by Emily Culliton (Vintage, $15.95.) In this debut novel, a Brooklyn mother has embezzled a modest amount from her children's private school. When it faces an audit, she leaves her family behind and goes on the lam. As she tries to carve out a new place in the world, Marion turns out to be a delightful antiheroine and defies expectation at every turn.