A Surrender of Innocence

...And sado-sexual fantasies...

...and is this not exactly how life goes...

...The most space and attention in this memoir are given to the writer's life from nine to 15 in Brooklyn and Manhattan in the late 30s and early 40s...

...The rest of the book is devoted to the college years (Radcliffe), and the desertion of home and mother and Brooklyn for Manhattan and being a writer...

...There is something so sad and true about the pacing of this book, something that says more about mortality than all the ponderously universal books that announce that they are going to tell us how it is...

...Miss Jaffe tackles the honesty problem in her forward: "None of this may be the way it happened, but it's the way I remember it...

...The narrative sings with detail: the regimen forced on a friend by her evil mother (buttermilk, prunes, early bedtime...

...Don't all children have imaginary friends...

...There is a tendency in certain quarters to dismiss Rona Jaffe as a kind of New York Grace Metalious, but there is always a tendency in those quarters to scorn the creators of highly readable books...

...Although the narrative is never noticeably abrupt, one is always finding its "I" suddenly two years older or 20 pounds lighter or a generation less innocent...

...The Cherry in the Martini has an exceptional atmosphere of honest recollection and psychological validity...

...Please pass the cod-liver oil and Simone de Beauvoir...

...In the last chapter the girl is a woman, and successful, and discovers that the rewards of attaining these plateaus are affairs with married men and wondering whether or not you gave your lover gonorrhea...

...The Cherry in the Martini says all this without any help, and it says it beautifully...

...the intimacy with life and self are gone...

...And then, "But why is it that when you win you also lose...

...whatever, if anything, did not really happen might well have happened-to this child and young woman, to any child and young woman...

...If there is one aspect of The Cherry in the Martini that is most incontrovertibly authentic, it is the leaping motion of the book...

...But now there is Rona Jaffe and The Cherry in the Martini...

...It is only in the trimmings and interpretations of the facts-the title, the foreward, the epilogue, and assorted abstractions and statements about life-that Miss Jaffe commits the super-child sin, and that this book is less than excellent...

...we wake up one morning and we are that much older or thinner or less innocent, and only then do we try to reconstruct (or invent) the transitional journey...

...Things are real because they seem that way...

...the imaginary victim-friends of the only child when her first sexuality manifests itself in imaginary loving torture...

...It's explained in a prefatory excerpt from a story the author wrote when she was 13, about an old maid who "stared morosely at the cherry in the martini" while eating alone at Schrafft's one night...

...the self-conscious adolescent's escape to a third-person existence...

...and this and similar intrusions say only that Miss Jaffe is not quite sure that anyone else was ever young and then suddenly not young, and therefore capable of understanding what her story is all about...

...You are wondering maybe about the title...

...Reviewed by NANCY WEBER Film Critic, "Manhattan East" Perhaps no time or place or state of being is quite so hazardous for the chronicler to explore as his own growing-up years...

...and the comments tend to be undeservedly possessive about some very common traits of childhood...

...Here the narrative switches to the third person...

...Don't all children commute between excruciating involvement in life and total withdrawal to a private dream world...

...The book is better than this, beyond this explaining, this coy way of saying: Ladies and gentlemen, you have just read 190 pages about the groping toward and final attainment of adulthood, and I feel obligated to tell you, in case you haven't guessed, that the knowledge acquired upon coming of age may just not be worth the surrender of innocence demanded in payment...

...If the book is also sometimes arch and annoying in these first pages it is because Rona Jaffe, grown-up, cannot resist commenting on Rona Jaffe, little kid...

...We don't feel ourselves moving from there to here...

...Miss Jaffe is unnecessarily nervous about the quotient of truth in her book...

...And so we live all our lives remembering it the way it seemed...

...This is a living child who knows real people: a friend who likes being called Goon, Aunt Rose who makes apple pancakes, Maria who is the object of everybody's schoolgirl crush...

...And moments of being not an "I" but a "she" or a "he...

...She is a real writer, and The Cherry in the Martini is a real book about a real girl's growing-up...

...At the other end of the book is an epilogue with this bit of information: "A martini has an olive...

...Miss Jaffe may be somewhat over-awed by her own sensitivity, and somewhat grudging in her estimation of the rest of the world's power to perceive, but there are worse faults...

...If it is so painless to ingest, how can it possibly do me any good...

...The special and almost inevitable folly of the modern woman writer to brave the odds and revisit her girlhood usually produces her least truthful-seeming work...

...being grown-up, it turns out, is a lonely business and not quite what it was cracked up to be...

...We all have so heavy an investment in our childhood having been a little more magic, a little more traumatic, and infinitely more mixed-up than anyone else's, that the chances of seeing it straight, much less telling it that way, are very, very slender...

...Behind Jaffe's simple prose there is the compassion and weariness and overcoming of weariness that marks a real person, a real woman, and that is more than can be said for those tape-recorders-with-female-sex-organs who are our most vaunted literary ladies...

...I'm sure none of the people it happened to remember it right either, because people never do...