Novel: Boys and Girls Together

Overview
William Goldman's Boys and Girls Together traces the lives of a cluster of young Manhattanites as they move through careers, friendships, and tangled romances during the early 1960s. The novel watches them pursue ambition and connection in a city that promises reinvention but often delivers compromise. Events unfold with an unflinching eye for how desire, luck, and character shape outcomes.
Goldman presents the story as a social mosaic rather than a single-hero narrative. Multiple viewpoints intersect and diverge, producing a portrait of a generation wrestling with the cost of upward mobility and the erosion of youthful ideals.

Plot and Structure
The narrative follows several characters whose professional goals and private lives collide in offices, apartments, and bars across Manhattan. Careers , in publishing, advertising, theater, and other urban professions , become arenas for both achievement and compromise, where ethical lines blur and personal relationships are strained by ambition. Romantic entanglements and betrayals underscore how practical choices and emotional needs complicate one another.
Rather than building to a single climactic event, the book moves episodically, allowing small victories and defeats to accumulate into a broader sense of weariness. The ending resists tidy resolution: some characters gain the status they sought but find it less fulfilling than expected, while others are left to reckon with loss and regret.

Characters
The ensemble cast is sharply drawn, each figure given distinct desires and flaws. Some are eager, brash, and opportunistic; others are quieter and more principled, often paying a price for it. Goldman shows how ambition amplifies differences in temperament, so that similar choices lead to very different outcomes depending on temperament and circumstance.
Relationships are key to the character work, and friendships often fracture under stress. Romantic liaisons reveal both tenderness and cruelty, and the novel is particularly interested in the transactions , emotional, sexual, professional , that define interpersonal life in the city.

Themes
Ambition and compromise are at the novel's core. Goldman interrogates what success costs when measured against integrity and personal happiness. Achievement often arrives through small moral concessions, and the accumulation of those concessions becomes a central tragedy: not a single catastrophic act, but gradual erosion.
The book also explores disillusionment and the limits of self-creation. Manhattan is depicted as a place of possibility but also of relentless competition that can hollow out values. Loneliness and the struggle for authentic connection recur, as characters discover that social mobility can isolate as much as it elevates.

Style and Tone
Goldman's prose is direct, conversational, and frequently ironic, with an eye for concrete detail and the rhythms of urban speech. Dialogue snaps with realism, and scenes often unfold with a cinematic clarity that reflects the author's later screenwriting sensibility. The tone ranges from caustic to empathetic, allowing both critique and compassion to coexist.
The novel balances sharp social observation with intimate moments, avoiding melodrama in favor of quieter, accumulative impact. Humorous touches puncture darker passages, keeping the narrative alive and human.

Reception and Legacy
Upon publication the book drew attention for its ambitious scale and its candid look at young urban life. Reactions were mixed: some readers praised Goldman's energy and insight, while others found the length and moral sweep uneven. Over time the novel has been recognized as a significant early work by an author who would go on to shape American storytelling in both novels and film.
Boys and Girls Together remains notable for its unvarnished depiction of compromise and the ways ordinary choices shape destinies, offering a snapshot of midcentury Manhattan and a broader meditation on the price of success.