Careers for Women

May 1, 2017
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.

May 15, 2017
A Rona Jaffe-esque office drama mingles with an environmental morality tale a 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 boss--and her baby's father--moves 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.

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Starred review from June 1, 2017
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2017

A MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Scott returns with a novel that should prove both thought provoking and entertaining, especially for Mad Men fans. In 1958, at the Public Relations Department of the New York Port Authority, glass-ceiling breaker Lee Jaffe inspires the young women around her, especially Maggie Gleason. But the disappearance of Pauline Moreau, whom Lee had sheltered under her wing, causes Maggie to rethink her assumptions about love, work, and ambition. With a 30,000-copy first printing.

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