I love this novel—first reading, second reading, browsing—but I can't make ["Falling"] sound as good as it is. If all plot summaries distort, and if all happy endings threaten corn, what can one do about a story that begins with Elizabeth, a fat, sloppy, unloving, miserable student who attempts suicide and that then turns her into a good poet, a superb teacher, a generous daughter and a happy wife? Well, what one can do with old-fashioned stuff like that is precisely what Susan Fromberg Schaeffer shows us in "Falling."

Since the material is in part made of suicide and despair, of mindless cruelties by lovers and parents, it would have been easier to follow Sylvia Plath, say, and show how a young, gifted, reasonably cheerful young lady can move from comfortable promise to suicide. But in all Bildungsromanen it is the journey and not the goal that mainly matters, and here the journey is marvelous indeed.

The journey is not only convincing, it is for the most part very funny. I can't think of any other treatment of "the way those young people live now" that has made me laugh so much. The males in Elizabeth's life, for example, are almost all splendidly awful. (p. 56)

A special intellectual energy is added to [Elizabeth's childhood] memories by weaving them with the sessions in her psychoanalyst's office and with confirming episodes from the present. I had though I would never again want to read any fiction, funny or solemn, that included a wise analyst. But the gentle shrewd probing succeeds here because of Elizabeth's sharp ironic fury against the guru and against herself.

We are engaged with remarkable intensity in this young woman's fight for a life of her own; somehow, as in the best of Bellow, the very possibility of life in such a world seems at stake. As we catch through her eyes occasional images of beauty and mystery, images that transform the intellectual deciphering into promises of meaning, we come to care very much about whether this sharp-eyed lost woman can find a way to live without self-deception, an acceptance of all that has been done against her and all that she has done to destroy herself. The causes for despair have been made totally convincing: here be dragons enough to flesh out anyone's full existentialist wailing. Everyone in the novel is, after all, falling. And we fear that for Elizabeth all ambiguities about that word falling might be removed: this secular comedy could turn into a simple descent into hell.

But forgiveness comes, and with it a final dream that yields unambiguous acceptance, without simplifying the many kinds of falling…. (pp. 56-7)

None of this is protected, be it said, with so much as a momentary lapse into fashionable stuff about "you're only reading a novel," about the author's clever awareness of narrative wheels within wheels. This author stands firmly behind what she tells. In short, it is the stuff we are told is no longer possible, serious fiction. Except maybe for Cynthia Ozick, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is the finest new talent we've seen in a long while. (p. 57)