Marantz Cohen is a distinguished professor of English at Drexel University and the author of several novels about Jane Austen.
For fans of a contemporary sort of Jane Austen, Suzanne Davis Gets a Life will be a perfect match. Though Davis has a plan for getting a life, cancer derails that plan, and in so doing, sets Davis up for a new understanding of herself and her relationship to her mother and the world. What she decides she needs: a man, a marriage, some kids, and a lot of distance between herself and her mother. When Suzanne Davis takes stock of her life at age thirty-four, she has the following: a tiny New York City apartment in a good building, an overbearing mother, and an average job as a tech writer. She ends by getting a life - even as she may lose one.Both amusing and moving, this Austen-influenced romance comments on cancer, female expectations, and what makes a good life. But serious illness opens her to new people and a new perspective. But can such a search possibly yield the meaning she craves? When her extremely annoying mother arrives on the scene, it appears that her plan has been hijacked.
We can't help but wish Suzanne success in "getting a life". Light in its tone but incisive in its social satire, Suzanne Davis Gets a Life balances its wit with true concern for its protagonist. All are keenly observed by Suzanne, whose witty self-deprecation endears her to us even as it makes us want to shake some sense into her. Her quest plunges us into the world of her Upper West Side apartment building, a world of overly invested mothers, fanatical dog-owners, curmudgeonly long-time residents, and young (and not so young) professionals. As her 35th birthday looms, Suzanne embarks on a wrong-headed, but very funny, quest - to find Mr Right and start the family she hopes will give meaning to her life.
Suzanne Davis lounges around her tiny New York City apartment in her pyjamas, writing press releases for the International Association of Air-Conditioning Engineers, listening to the ticking of her biological clock, and wondering where life is taking her.
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