When it first published in 1958, Rona Jaffe's debut novel electrified readers who saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. There's Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor's office; naive country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Now a classic, and as page-turning as when it first came out, The Best of Everything portrays their lives and passions with intelligence, affection, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.

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The Best of Everything sparks discussions at Penguin

Some of the Penguin team got together over a few cocktails to discuss The Best of Everything.

'It is, I think, the perfect summer read: juicy, involving and classy. Even as you smile at the thought that smoking was once considered a skill, and white cotton gloves a wardrobe basic, it will also make you feel nostalgic for your own past, for those feverish days when fear and elation were pretty much the same thing.' Rachel Cooke, The Observer

'As Draper himself might say: fascinating.'The Times

The Best of Everything: Chapter 7

‘He just likes to be alone at times,’ Gregg said. ‘He’s a lone wolf.’
Wolf is right, Caroline thought, but said nothing. She wasn’t
quite easy in her mind about this aff air. Not that she was a prude,
despite her stringent upbringing and the virtuous lies she and her
college friends had all told one another about their private lives.
But she felt with a certainty that David Wilder Savage did not love
Gregg, despite what Gregg wanted to believe. In the first place, he
had never said he loved her. Then, too, there was his reputation.
Why should a man like him, who had everything he wanted except
a heart, turn mushy over a girl like Gregg? He never called for her
or took her home, but made her meet him at his office or at a
restaurant. At three o’clock in the morning he took her down to
the street in front of his apartment and put her into a cab. Was this
devotion? But he called Gregg every day and he saw her nearly
every night, so that at least was devotion of a sort.
‘Some people are made to be hurt,’ Caroline told Mike one
night. ‘It doesn’t even take much trying. Gregg is that type, and
look who she’s tied up with!’
‘Don’t you think she chose him for that purpose?’ Mike asked.’
‘To get hurt? Not Gregg.’
‘Don’t you think she would have avoided him?’
‘Not David Wilder Savage. I could hardly have avoided him
myself.’
‘You met him?’
‘Twice. Gregg and I were having a drink in a restaurant before
he came to meet her. He talks to you like you’re the only person
in the world.’
‘Would you like to sleep with him?’ Mike asked calmly and
curiously.
‘Mike! I don’t think about men I meet that way.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, girls don’t.’
‘Of course they do,’ Mike said, finishing what was his eighth or
ninth drink. ‘Women have exactly the same feelings as men do, if
they’d only admit it to themselves. A man sees a beautiful girl
walking down the street, or he meets her somewhere, and he says
to himself matter-of-factly, with no intention of doing anything
about it, I’d like to sleep with that girl. That doesn’t mean he’d
even try to start a conversation. But he accepts his own feelings.’