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This is Elizabeth's
story—what brought her wobbling to the edge of suicide, and how she
eventually decided that life was very much worth living, when you had the
hang of it. |
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It is a funny, moving, and absorbing
story, gradually emerging from marvelously recorded sessions with the analyst,
and from vivid flashbacks to her chldhood in a traditional four-generation
Jewish family. A graduate student at Chicago University, Elizabeth's life
has collapsed in a heap around her like the mess her apartment was in. Slowly
sorting things out, picking her way, letting her present catch up with her
past, Elizabeth puts things together, all the time trying to steer herself
through some zany love affairs and hold onto her teaching job. Finally upright,
but still shaky, Elizabeth decides to move to New York.
Elizabeth gingerly feels her way about the
city, the people, her family, life, trying to fit in without falling, and
to get her feet on the ground.
Elizabeth is one of the most engaging young women encountered in recent fiction.
While her story has its moments of bleakness and panic, it also sparkles
with laughter—and at the end, with outright comedy. |
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"This is wonderful and amazing. This is natural prose.
This is how it is to be Elizabeth as a child. Beautiful, and with what simplicity
and flow and power."
Cynthia Ozick
"Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is an extraordinarily gifted novelist. Her writing
is alive, and the world she describes jumps with the vitality of real life.
After reading a slew of books about rather unreal female heroines, most of
which seem hastily put together to get in on the women's lib background,
it is a delight to read a novel that is the author's own creation."
Barbara Probst Solomon
"In the maturing of Ms. Schaeffer's non-heroine, her identity never seems
in question—a welocme relief from the current gold rush of identity
seekers. She sloughs off hang-ups and ignorance in a continuing interlocking
process that is no less fascinating because we know that it will repeat itself
periodically as long as she continues to grow. With delicate observation
and brilliantly focused detail the episodes roll out like scroll painting."
May Natalie Tabak |
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