In A Fortunate Age, the debut novel from Joanna Smith Rakoff (Scribner, $26.00), six Oberlin graduates discover for themselves what twentysomethings have known for generations: life in New York can be filled with possibilities, adventures, hardships and heartbreak. An homage to Mary McCarthy’s classic 1930s novel, The Group, Smith Rakoff ’s entertaining comic account tumbles through the lives of overeducated young Jews forging their familiar paths in late 1990s Brooklyn.