Rona Jaffe was well-known as a columnist for Cosmopolitan in the 1960’s and published sixteen books, beginning with her most well-known novel, The Best of Everything (1958), which was an instant hit, and became a movie with Joan Crawford. Away From Home, which follows three expatriate couples working in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, was her second novel. It is not a crime novel, but is included in this blog because it so well offers a glimpse of the late Fifties, early Sixties.
The novel opens with a Christmas Eve party. It is a character-driven novel and the first couple introduced is Helen and Bert Sinclair. “They were a good-looking couple, he very dark, she fair, both young, with the look of settled Americans in a foreign country: healthy, sleek, privileged, proud, and vulnerable. Helen wonders if everything in life has to be so ordered, eating on schedule, sleeping on schedule, making love on schedule. In Rio, they attend parties, talk to the maids, make menus, lists, and social schedules. “Is that all life has turned into for us,” she wonders.
Margie and Neil Davidow are the second couple introduced in the novel. “She was a smallish, dark girl, with an excellent figure, and an even more spectacular clothes sense, and an incredible neatness and feminity of person that passed for beauty.” They had been married for five years. Neil was 31. Margie was 25 and was Helen’s best friend. Outwardly, Margie has it all, but after a few drinks at the party, confesses: :Sometimes, like this evening before we got here, I wish I were dead.” On the surface, they were the perfect charming couple, but in the bedroom, Margie wanted to scream when Neil touched her. He is frustrated and wonders if she is really interested in women or if she would be happier with someone else. He had been the perfect pick for an upper East Side girl “except for a wildly romantic passionate love.”
Mildred and Phil Burns were giving the party and were known as Mil and Phil. Mil, who had once before the husband and three kids, had been Iowa Corn Queen, but she had arrived in Rio, “protestingly, hating the apartment, hating the climate, hating the cockroaches, hating the telephone system, hating the tan bath water.” Brazil isn’t as pretty as it looks, Mil confides.
The three couples soon find that Brazil is a whole different world from the temptations of Carnival to the fact that all married men seem to have a mistress on the side and an apartment to meet her in. They have different ways of navigating these treacherous waters with some falling to temptation, perhaps for the better, and some running away from the open sex buffets and finding their way back to their partners. It is a character-driven novel with very little in the way of crime or capers other than the various infidelities and a threat to kill. Nevertheless, it is a novel which captures an era.
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