BOOK REVIEW : Two Co-eds Take a Curriculum in Self-Destruction

A tale of two Smithies, “Playing With Fire” begins on Day 1 of the college year, when the narrator, Lucy Greenburg, and her assigned roommate, Carolyn Ward, meet in the freshman dorm. Despite an intense high school romance, Lucy is an eager New Jersey innocent with the all-American looks of the child model she was. Carolyn Ward, on the other hand, is a dark and angular beauty, with the brooding eyes and jaded air of a woman who has seen everything at least twice.

The granddaughter of a renowned Hebrew scholar, Lucy has grown up in a loving and traditionally religious household, while Carolyn is the wounded survivor of her parent’s divorce and her mother’s remarriage to Ben Broadhurst, a tycoon whose overpowering presence is meant to blind you to the fact that he has the instincts of an undernourished piranha. Despite these superficial social and cultural differences (or because of them), the roommates are thrilled with one another, bonding like instant epoxy.

Carolyn is hardly unpacked before she leaves campus without a word, to vanish mysteriously for days and weeks at a time, a pattern that arouses virtually no interest on the part of the Smith community. Since this is apparently the mid-1970s, one doesn’t expect the college to act in loco parentis , though a bit of friendly curiosity wouldn’t be amiss, at least in the case of a disappearing freshman at a small residential school. Except for a single loaded reference to a literature class studying “Mourning Becomes Electra,” the college scarcely seems to exist except as a venue for the fateful meeting of Lucy and Carolyn. We meet no professors, administrators, classmates or dates, though Lucy does talk a great deal about her hermetically happy childhood, in frequent flashbacks that momentarily distract us from the fact that the entire plot is implicit in the title. That alone should serve as a warning that we’re on the dark side of paradise.

“Playing With Fire” is ominous, the omens beginning by Page 16 and escalating so rapidly thereafter that it’s impossible to imagine anyone with the SATs to qualify for Smith not tumbling to the truth about Carolyn Ward by Mountain Day, if not sooner. Still, Lucy tends to interpret events in the light of her own limited experience, which, to be fair, has never included anyone remotely like her roommate. Even when Carolyn’s social X-ray mother appears to ask about her missing daughter, Lucy maintains a protective silence. She doesn’t really know, does she, and moreover, Lucy is determined to emulate her cool and sophisticated friend.

“Somewhere along the line, I decided to be just like her. I decided adversity would agree with me.”

The rest of the novel describes the transformation of Lucy Greenburg into a duplicate of Carolyn Ward, a sordid adventure in which she’s heartily encouraged by the very same lover who turned Carolyn into a zombie.

Since there is only one major character in the book besides Lucy’s wholesomely Orthodox family, who exist either in Heaven or New Jersey, suspense about this particular Mephisto is minimal.

There are only a limited number of sexual relationships possible when you have only two women and one man, and the author exploits them to the utmost, which isn’t very far.

The prose, in this story of self-destructive passions, is so dense with foreboding innuendo that one has the disconcerting sense of rereading the book, a strange phenomenon exacerbated by the fact that since Lucy willfully relives Carolyn’s anguished history, Part Two is a replica of Part I, with the details fully spelled out.

PLAYING WITH FIRE

by Dani Shapiro , Doubleday, $17.95, 303 pages

Next: Carolyn See reviews Paul Griffiths’ “Myself and Marco Polo” (Random House).