Juggling Lives

LIKE THE YOUNG girl trapped in the sunrise-to-sunset rituals and routines of summer camp, all of Johanna Kaplan's characters try to trace out an existence apart from the tangle of personalities whose lives never quite mesh with their own. Success is not a shared feature of their struggle; it's too easy to opt for an extreme solution, to let one's inner life give way to silent partnership in other people's fantasies, or, worse, to protect against this kind of dissolution by erecting a rock-like barrier between oneself and the world--a barrier proofed against intrusions from the outside but powerless to subdue inner hurts. It is the various strategies women use to affect a compromise between their inner claims and the pressures of other peoples' fears and expectations which provide the unifying theme of Other People's Lives, Kaplan's first collection of short stories.

Most of these stories are experienced through the medium of an immature female consciousness. These girls and young women are acute observers--their very immaturity allows them to see and wonder at the contradictions other people are forced to live with. In the title story, for example, Louise--just released from a private mental institution--finds herself a boarder at the home of the middle-aged Tobeys. Dennis Tobey is a minor celebrity--a dancer now laid up with Hodgkins' disease, but still the subject of adoring paeans delivered by his well-meaning friends. One of these assures his wife, Maria, "He was certainly never boring," but she knows better:

Maybe on stage not, But in life, always. Chronical. Like his disease now--also chronical.

Louise, unlike most of Kaplan's other characters, just takes it all in. Other peoples' lives beckon her because, ashamed of her past and uncertain of her future, she has so little life of her own. Her self-image is wrapped up in the stigma of "craziness," so she flees from it, finding forgetfulness through absorption in the petty doings of people she scarcely knows.

LOUISE SEEKS escape from the vacuousness of her own life--she feels sometimes "as if she alone were standing there, caught in a black-and-white frame while everyone else was moving around in color." To Miriam, the protagonist of "Sour or Suntanned. It Makes No Difference," the main problem, on the other hand, is how to avoid being contaminated by the grayness of other peoples' lives. To this unhappily observant child, the world is composed of an admixture of liars and fool, typified by an aunt "who spent her life thinking there was not much children could understand" and an uncle who keeps trying to figure out which countries are "faking it" with Socialism. Miriam's often bewildered scorn can find no surer irritant than the fakery of summer camp. "They were all people you hardly knew and would probably never see again," she says of her fellow campers. "There was no reason to spend the whole summer hugging them."

In the end, though, Miriam arrives at a seemingly healthier strategy for survival than most of Kaplan's other protagonists. Drawn into superficial conformity with a ritualistic world (in camp the bugle sounded early each morning, and "there was no way at all to stop anything that came after"), she nevertheless vows to "keep all her aliveness a secret."

Miriam is at least better off than Naomi in "Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary," whose sense of abandonment leads her to forsake her love for languages and turn to the field of psychiatry, where people are transformed into cases. At home in faceless hospital corridors, she prescribes electroshock therapy and hides her own hurt in stony silence.

While Naomi's strategy is self-destructive, Sut-On in "Dragon Lady" lashes out at others instead. A Chinese girl living near Saigon, Sut-On is unable to define a place for herself in either French or Vietnamese society so she becomes the Dragon Lady, exorcising her not-belonging through murder. "If her heart is remote," Kaplan writes, "she'd be the last one to know it."

KAPLAN'S MAIN GIFT is for capturing character through dialogue. Her children talk like children, but they are exceptionally aware; their most outstanding characteristic is their refusal to skirt the contradictions the adult world glides over with so much facility. For example, when Miriam's uncle tells her why she must stay at camp ("It's good for you to be outside and it's good for you to get used to it"), she answers him simply: "Why should I get used to it if I don't like it?" In fact, Kaplan's adults seem almost traditionally child-like in their blindness, perhaps because they have already made the compromises necessary for survival and are afraid to examine too closely what they have given up.

Kaplan treats her characters compassionately. There are no real villains in these stories, only people who seem more unpleasant than others--like Miriam's aunt and Sut-On's money-grubbing uncle--because their struggle with life has crippled them more.

While Kaplan's dialogue generally rings true, her descriptions sometimes seem labored. Most annoying is her virtual addiction to placing two adjectives in front of every noun:

Throughout the long rows small, diligent heads were bent over the copybooks on the desks, and over the sounds of busy, scratching pens only a clock ticked...In the back, however, in the row closest to the windows, set a pale, this youth whose dark, brooding eyes turned not to his copybook but to the green, budding world beyond the window.

In addition, not all of Kaplan's stories succeed equally well. The title story drags on much too long (it's actually more like a novells) and its length contributes to its dullness. The main problem lies in the story's conception. There isn't enough of Louise in the story, mainly because there isn't much of Louise to begin with. Nevertheless, people's lives seen in all the pettiness of daily detail--filtered through a consciousness that simply absorbs rather than patterns--can get tiresome, even if this very tiresomeness helps to frame the story's message.

"Dragon Lady," on the other hand, seems less convincing than most of Kaplan's other stories, probably because of its setting. While Kaplan excels at capturing the intonations and idiosyncracies of East European refugees, it's harder for her to tellingly depict the problems of growing up Chinese in Vietnam. Or perhaps it's just harder for the reader to empathize with her depiction.

THESE LAPSES, however, seem less important beside Kaplan's achievement. A first-time author, she may need to polish her technique, but she already has at her command no meager arsenal of short-story writing equipment. Above all, these stories display her sure handed ability to sketch character in a few lines of dialogue and her understanding of the delicate juggling act an individual must perform to balance the sharing of other people's lives with the need for one's own private existence.