The Room-Mating Season

Having never experienced Rona Jaffe’s work before, I started into this book with no real expectations in mind. Let me say this right now, I won’t be going back to her work any time soon. Not only were the morals in this book appalling, the characters were shallow, and if I may be frank, in need of a good therapist.

The Room-Mating Season starts out in the early sixties. The reader is introduced to three main characters, Leigh, Vanessa, and Cady, who live in New York. They are all roommates, all in their mid-twenties, and all share a small living area, since they can’t afford anything else. And I can’t forget Susan, who was the fourth roommate, but still wasn’t mentioned enough to be considered a “main” character.

This novel gradually follows these three women through their lives, right up to the start of the twenty-first century. Any reader will get to learn about their loves, their losses, their hardships, and their completely crazy personalities. Their lives are generally free of any real tragedy, except near the beginning of the book, when Susan kills herself by jumping off of the roof of their building. There’s nothing really incredible about this book, except for how awful it is, and this is coming from a person who is generally very tolerant with literature.

First of all, these women were complete head-cases. Their morals were appalling. Even Leigh, who supposedly is the sensible one, gets into an affair. These women sleep around like there’s nothing wrong with it, make nothing of cheating on their significant others, and don’t even blink if person they are sleeping with is married. And keep in mind, this all starts in the 1960’s! They all came from fairly loving homes, had a fairly normal childhood, and it seems unrealistic that their parents didn’t give them any sense of morals whatsoever.

Knowing it or not, Jaffe sends out a very bad message about love in this book. The only way these women find happiness with a man is by cheating. All relationships in this book involve that awful word in some form, which I found to be a huge turn-off. The only main character who stayed in a stable relationship is Leigh. But, did I mention that her successful marriage started from an affair? That’s right. The two started seeing each other while her husband was still married, and then he eventually left his wife for her. Cady had an incredibly unrealistic affair with a man for over twenty years. Vanessa… do not even get me started with her. Even after she got married and moved away, she would take these trips back to New York, and then cheat with a stranger just so she could feel wanted. Out of all of them, she was the most sick, and therapy probably would have done her some honest good. She did this until she was too old to pick up a man, and then she had another affair with her friend, who had feelings for her ever since they first met. Jaffe’s work seems to say one major thing, and that would be the only way to find love is to be unfaithful.

This whole book seemed like a train that was heading down the road to derailment. Even the death of Susan wasn’t done nearly as well as it could have been. There was no real explanation why she was hated so much by the other three women, and when she actually died, they didn’t really seem to mourn all that much, especially if the reader considers that they lived with this woman for a fair amount of time. It seemed like the author herself wasn’t quite sure of how impactful she made the death either, because Susan ended up getting the occasional mention throughout the ages, which didn’t add any texture to the plot whatsoever. Instead, it seemed like Jaffe felt she needed to remind people of Susan’s demise, simply for the sake of getting it out there. The only thing that kept me reading this novel was my compulsion to see how bad it could get, and how far these women could go before some kind of reality set in and slapped them in the face. Which… never happened.

All in all, The Room-Mating Season is not a book that is worth anybody’s time. Unless you want to read about shallow women with no morals, I suggest picking up a love story that is actually in touch with the real world. If you want to read a few great books that involve romance, I suggest The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audry Niffenegger, and Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay.