"Unravished," by Hester Kaplan

Because I was both shaken by and drawn into the worlds of the two books by Hester Kaplan that I read earlier, I was happy to hear of and read her new book, “Unravished: Stories” (Ig, 2014). The two earlier books are “The Edge of Marriage: Stories,” about which I posted on 2/15/13, and “The Tell,” which I wrote about here on 6/29/13. I used the overused, but apt in this case, term “heartbreaking” about the first book, and that word could be applied to the second and now the third of her works of fiction that I have read (she also published an earlier novel, “Kinship Theory,” which I have not yet read). A basic question that Kaplan’s characters keep having to ask, consciously or unconsciously, is how they can possibly live with the seemingly impossible-to-accept situations in which they have somehow been placed. In the case of “Unravished”: What if your spouse is doing something you find morally unacceptable? How do you deal with mixed feelings of revulsion and excitement about the actions of a former lover? How do you face finding you have symptoms of a possibly fatal illness? How can you possibly make sense of slowly realizing that a young girl you are starting to know is being used and abused by a repugnant neighbor? And there are other instances of abuse, of trauma, of life-changing news, and of characters unable to negotiate the difficulties and obstacles of life. How can they possibly face and cope with these life events? Yet they do, they do, somehow they do, because they have no choice. Most devastating of all is the situation in the last story, “This is Your Last Swim,” in which two characters who don’t much like each other – the head and the dean of a boarding school, both women – find themselves alone on the school campus after some sort of destructive world-changing event that has left desolation and hopelessness behind. Facing the end of life as they know it, and perhaps soon of life itself, the two characters have to find a way to help each other in these last days. Usually I am not drawn to these kinds of apocalyptic themes, but in this case, the situation is less about science fiction/dystopia and more about human relationships. The situation in this last story seems to the reader to be the ultimate example of the theme throughout all the stories, that of facing the impossible. But, as in the other stories, the theme is not schematic or monolithic. I don’t want to leave the impression that these stories are all, or only, depressing. Kaplan makes us care about her characters. And her plots are original, so we want to keep reading to see what happens. Even more important, she makes us see that although life is full of seemingly impossible obstacles and sadness, there is always love, hope, and humanity as well. This is a wonderful, compelling, beautifully written collection of stories.