The latest addition to Ecco’s eclectic and reliably rewarding “Art of the Story” series revives Kaplan’s Jewish Book Award–winning 1975 collection
Other People’s Lives, now with two more essays. Dropping readers into those lives as they unfold in all their messy, egoistic imperfection, Kaplan offers sly glimpses of human foibles and vulnerabilities, often through the penetrating eyes of young misfits, latter-day Jane Eyres. The opening novella, “Other People’s Lives,” in which emotionally troubled Louise is abruptly moved from an upscale sanitarium into the raucous home of Maria, a German immigrant prone to malapropisms, is a tour de force of internal and external dialogue and monologue with all the eloquent verisimilitude of a Robert Altman film.
VERDICT Francine Prose’s preface aptly praises Kaplan’s “paradoxically scathing and compassionate insight” into characters revealed in the midst of an uncertain present, poised between Old World and New. A rare gem, recovered.
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