Marjorie Morgenstern lives with her parents on Central Park West in the 1930s. She’s a good girl despite how frequently she argues with her mother. She does well in school and is well-liked socially, being especially popular with the boys because of her good looks and sweet disposition. She is in short, a very ordinary American girl.
Except the last thing Marjorie wants to be is ordinary. The easiest thing in the world for her to do would be to go to work as a secretary at her father’s company, meet a boy her parents approve of through their temple, marry him and have children. But Marjorie wants to be an actress, taking on the surname Morningstar as a bid for a more theatrical-sounding name. (It is a translation of Morganstern from German.)
A fateful job working at a Jewish summer camp results in her meeting Noel Airman, also a stage name. Noel is the son of a prominent judge who shocked his family by abandoning law school and going into the theater. He’s written some popular songs and is trying to put together a musical. Noel is charming, sophisticated and incandescently intelligent, but he’s also lazy, neurotic, and peripatetic, constantly squandering opportunities.
Of course, Marjorie falls head over heels for Noel. The bulk of the novel is spent following their contentious relationship, wherein Noel constantly belittles her notions of marriage and respectability while she desperately tries to get him to commit, not just to their relationship, but to a profession, and to being a stable, suitable person.
Noel is an infuriating character. It’s legitimately difficult to read his patronizing monologues towards Marjorie and not fall into a rage. One of the questions going into a book like this is how well a male writer like Herman Wouk would be able to write about a female main character. As a male myself, perhaps I had better not answer that question definitively. But I do feel fairly comfortable that Wouk has nailed the character of the “shitty boyfriend.” Noel is at his worst when he insists to Marjorie that despite all her protestations of wanting to be an actress, of wanting to have an unusual, exciting life, that she is, in fact, a “Shirley” like all the others: a young Jewish woman looking to secure her future by marrying a successful man and getting him to move out to the suburbs and settle down to domestic life. Since that fate is his worst nightmare despite how much he loves Marjorie, he constantly sabotages both himself and their relationship.
This dance between Marjorie and Noel goes on for quite a while, both in the span of their lives and in pure page count. My edition of Marjorie Morningstar clocks in at 585 pages, and I’d be hard-pressed to say that it justifies that length. The book was a huge bestseller upon its publication, and was celebrated as a landmark in Jewish-American fiction. It does have a lot to offer readers as a portrait of Jewish life in 1930s America, especially social life. But it hints at larger, grander stories and shies back time and again.
Old-fashioned in both its structure and in its philosophy of life, Marjorie Morningstar could be a frustrating read for modern audiences, but its depiction of Jewish-American life in its time will be informative and commendable to many, and the well-drawn characters of Marjorie and Noel will appeal to many others just looking for a good yarn.