Book Review : A Bit of Overkill on a Journey Inward

Comfort by David Michael Kaplan (Viking: $15.95)

Elias, cushioned by a little money, is conducting a long retreat from life in his converted water mill in Connecticut. He does, however, take part in meetings of the local Theosophical Society.

When it was his turn to be host, “Elias prepared small quiches with lemon butter during the afternoon while the sky darkened and distant thunder rumbled.”

Those are Jamesian quiches; those are strongly indicative quiches. As Elias painstakingly prepares them, the author painstakingly prepares Elias. It is like going to dinner where the host spends just a little too long in the kitchen finishing the roast. When it is time to sit down, the guest is thinking “host?” while the host is thinking “glaze?”

A number of stories in the first collection by David Michael Kaplan share this quality of visible over-preparation. But what we are encountering is the defect of a virtue. Kaplan is a writer who cares enormously--not only about his characters and their pain, but about their accommodation. He houses them in verbal luxury, he treats them with a sensibility that could glow in the dark.

Most of the stories concern parents and children, their gulfs and griefs. In “Summer People,” an estranged father and his grown son come together to close up the lakeside house that the father is selling. Under their efforts at companionship, there is a web of old resentments and recrimination. Their irritation with each other is neatly set out--too neatly.

In “Magic,” another kind of tension--between an 8-year-old girl and the woman who may marry her divorced father--is resolved even more abruptly; by a small supernatural detour, in fact. After a day of frustrating efforts to make friends, the woman takes the girl out into the backyard and flies for her benefit.

In “The Man With Picasso’s Eyes,” a suburbanite settling into domesticity is unsettled when a passing woman tells him his eyes remind her of the painter’s. He is lifted, for a while, onto a plane where everything that happens to him seems signal and out-of-the-ordinary.

These various examples are Kaplan trying and not quite succeeding. He is trying for quite a lot, though; he is working for a rush of astonishment rather than a twinge of recognition. And in several cases he achieves it.

“Doe Season” is a beautifully told story of a girl whose ambition is to be her father’s son. He takes her on a hunting trip with a friend and the friend’s son, and stoutly defends her endurance and competence against their skepticism that a girl can make it on their terms.

She does, though; and as she does, she discovers that to be herself is to establish quite different terms.

“Doe Season” is quite perfect. So is the disquieting “Comfort,” which recounts the chilly stratagem of a young woman to expose the infidelity of a man who is the current lover of her roommate’s mother.

More than either of these, I prefer the mysterious and moving “Elisabetta, Carlotta, Katherine.” Elisabetta goes to Barbados after discovering a snapshot of a mother and child among the effects of her father, who has just died. She suspects that the father, who left home when she was little, had set up a second family. Her search for the snapshot figures becomes a poignant effort to come to terms with her own sense of abandonment.

In these three stories, Kaplan is less a designer of stories than a storyteller. He is no longer trying to catch his reader’s eye as he writes; his glance, as with all real storytellers, moves inward.