I was asked recently while having dinner with a few friends, what was the last good novel that I read. When I mentioned Maritta Wolff’s Night Shift, I got a few blank stares. That didn’t surprise me because I never heard of this novelist until a few months ago.
Maritta Wolff was a best-selling author in the 1940s and 1950s. It is never easy to describe someone’s writing style in a few words, but for the sake of brevity, I would say Wolff has that edgy toughness of Nelson Algren while also displaying the warmth and hope of the human spirit of John Steinbeck.
In the last few years, Wolff’s work has been enjoying a comeback with a whole new generation of readers. I hope Night Shift enjoys the same type of comeback as Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road.
Night Shift takes place in the winter of 1940-41 and is about Sally Otis who has to raise her three children and her unemployed sister on her own because her husband is locked in a mental institution due to a nervous breakdown. Wolff contrasts the financial hardships of Sally’s world with that of her younger sister, Petey, who is a lounge singer and is never at a loss in having money and men in her life. Wolff vividly shows the different worlds of these two sisters and also the bond they share despite their lifestyle differences.
Night Shift also illustrates the harshness of living in a large city, the cold brutality of desperate people, and the life-threatening hardships that many people faced when working factory jobs.
Reading Night Shift transported me to a period of time where life seemed so vastly different. But even though it was a different era, I thought how little life has changed in the last 70 years despite all of our technological advances and our deeper understanding of the human psyche. In the end, just like 70 years ago, most of us still struggle to earn a living, fail numerous times at finding a loving mate, and find that happiness is often elusive at best.