Strong Sister

By R.Z. Sheppard

FALLING by SUSAN FROMBERG SCHAEFFER

307 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

Falling is a rare example of an endangered fictional species--a novel about a person who happens to be a woman. Sexual politics, job rights--the whole shebang--have less immediacy for 31-year-old Elizabeth Kamen than the fact that she is a daughter, a granddaughter and one of millions of people caught in that ancient paradox, the human family. Parents love their children but do not know how to nudge them out of the nest without causing serious damage. Children love their parents but cannot leave gracefully.

Love, separations, anxiety, recriminations--the family is that perpetual-motion guilt machine, the treadmill to depression on which Elizabeth has bravely plodded. She has not had a distinguished childhood. Her father's idea of teaching her backseat car manners was to leave her stranded on a highway. She seems to have suffered more than her share of sprains and gashes.

As a young woman, Elizabeth is not particularly conscious of her body, which when finally described, turns out to be downright voluptuous. She is the kind of girl who does not know her proper dress size and will walk around with pneumonia. A bookcase falls on her in the middle of the night. Yet she has staying power and a willingness to learn. Above all, she is "drunk with a desire to lead a normal life." Elizabeth is a conventional woman, but not so conventional as to think that happiness is the most important thing in life. Although too busy living to say so, she has the classical grim view--that the goal of life is self-awareness, no matter what the cost.

Author Schaeffer makes readers count this cost in hard, undevalued emotional currency. It is no easy achievement, because she has chosen, or (in the event that much of Falling is autobiographical) has been stuck with, material long since worn to cliches -- Elizabeth's immigrant Jewish grandparents, the New York middle-class scene, an unsuccessful engagement, a suicide attempt, and a prolonged psychoanalysis.

Elizabeth even teaches literature and writes poetry.

The author handles all this with great credibility, tact and humor. But Elizabeth is more than a fleshed out case history because she has a strong character. For whatever reason, self-pity and the view that everyone is a victim, are not part of her makeup. Trying to be normal is very hard work. Elizabeth winds up with the philosophical and moral equivalent of dishpan hands. But she is not one to disguise expensively acquired truth under some perfumed, feminizing unguent.

sbR.Z. Sheppard

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