Authors and filmmakers keep reviving the early '70s because it's such a culturally rich and contradictory time, marked by conservative politics and libertine social lives. Even Republicans had shaggy hair and sideburns, and even liberal progressives struggled with how to balance spiritual freedom with a yearning for family and stability. Maritta Wolff's Sudden Rain confirms the flashback visions of people like P.T. Anderson and Rick Moody. Wolff, a popular author of the '40s and '50s, effectively retired after 1962, when her sixth novel was published. Sudden Rain was completed in '72, but sat in Wolff's refrigerator until her death 30 years later, reportedly because of a dispute with her publisher over promotion. The problem certainly wasn't one of quality or marketability. Sudden Rain is a highly readable, hot-button melodrama, following three middle-class couples and their friends and lovers over one uncomfortable Los Angeles weekend. The book has sex, violence, and heated conversations about whether the American family can survive an age of rampant drugs and divorce.
Those conversations are Sudden Rain's only real weakness. Wolff's realistic dialogue has been praised in the past, but most of Sudden Rain's speeches read like interior monologues spoken aloud, and a cross between John Cassavetes' open-hearted howls of anguish and the glibly issue-driven banter of Love, American Style. But Wolff did have a gift for building distinctive characters through what they say, pegging how people use recurring phrases like "fantastic" or "good deal" like bird calls. And Wolff was tough on her characters—especially the women. Sudden Rain's housewives act pushy and parasitic, and lean on modern jargon to talk themselves into being happy or unhappy on a moment-by-moment basis. Simultaneously, Wolff is specific enough about her heroines' worries, from their children's mental health to what they should have for lunch, that as she weaves their stories together, the anxiety mounts.
Sudden Rain's greatest strength is in the pages of description: of wood-paneled steak restaurants and lava-rock-lined driveways, of chain-smoking in government-building restrooms, and airlines with in-flight lounges. In modern fiction, this kind of social archaeology might be steeped in kitsch and irony, but Wolff acts as a first-person observer, noting how the denizens of suburban L.A. sell themselves stylish automobiles that won't run and affairs that can't last. At times, Sudden Rain strains to be the great Los Angeles novel, but Wolff reins it in well, understanding that there's as much to be learned from the particulars of a botched batch of waffles as from any screaming match.