FASHIONABLY LATE was first published in 1994. It wasn’t one of Olivia Goldsmith’s most successful books—I bet those were THE FIRST WIVES CLUB, THE BESTSELLER, and MARRYING MOM—but since she was a superstar novelist, all her novels sold well. Deservedly so, in my opinion.It’s the story of Karen Kahn, a New York fashion designer at the peak of her career. But her personal life is lacking. Though married to a man she adores, she discovers she cannot bear a child. And she desperately wants one. Nor does she have much closeness with her mother, a pretty chilly character. Karen believes that’s because she’s adopted. She goes in search of her bio mom, well aware that could bring a whole new round of heartache. Which it does, though not the way I expected.I enjoyed the book. Goldsmith did something you don’t see much nowadays in contemporary women’s fiction. She deeply researched an area—usually an industry—so that the reader feels plunged into that milieu. I’m dating myself because that was a staple of women’s fiction in the nineties. It’s something I do in my own writing, largely because learning about one field or another is really fun for me. I enjoyed when work—even hyped-up, dramatized work—played a substantive role in women’s fiction.Another thing I admire about Goldsmith’s writing is the consistency of her characters. They have distinctive personalities, and they’re the same people on page twelve and on page two hundred. I’m surprised how rare that is. I know how easy it can be for writers to twist a character to make them serve a plot point. Goldsmith didn’t fall into that trap.But there were a few things I wasn’t crazy about in FASHIONABLY LATE. So often Goldsmith made her male characters total louses. That is true of almost every heterosexual man in this book. Don’t get me wrong: some of her female characters are despicable, too. But that anti-male bias bothers me. I think part of it is that Goldsmith found her literary sweet spot in writing evil males. I note the review from Kirkus: “Goldsmith established her fertile turf in THE FIRST WIVES CLUB and hasn’t let up since; here she presents another witty, venomous tale of female resourcefulness in the face of breathtaking male duplicity.”One last thing that surprised me in FASHIONABLY LATE: there’s absolutely no romance. I kept waiting for one to develop, but it never did. Did I miss it? Yes. A bit. But the book stands on its own as a good read nonetheless.
