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Shattered Lives
| Article
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19741 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
2,378 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
PRIZED POSSESSIONS
Avery Corman
Simon and Schuster, 1991
320 pp., $19.95
Women worry about rape. They avoid deserted streets. They do not park their cars in unlighted parking lots. They know what might happen if they jog alone at the northern end of Manhattan's Central Park. They know they are vulnerable to violent abuse by psychopathic men. They learn to be suspicious of strangers.
In the past few years, however, women have learned something else: They are vulnerable to abuse not only by psychopaths, but by the men they live with or date. They might be forced to have sex not only by a madman holding a knife to their throat, but by the captain of the football team at their college, by a man they meet at a friend's party--even by their husbands. When a woman is forced to have sex without her consent, she has been raped.
Date or acquaintance rape, especially as it occurs on college campuses, has been given wide publicity since the mid-1980s. Many colleges have responded to the issue by creating crisis centers, hiring special counselors, and instituting educational programs. Date rape is not limited, of course, to the academic setting, but its prevalence in these communities has significantly influenced the public's perception of this issue. When eighteen-year-old women claim that they are raped in an environment that we consider safe, even wholesome, we want to know why.
That is the question Avery Corman asks in his new novel, Prized Possessions, the story of Elizabeth Mason, a talented and intelligent teenager who, in her first week at college, is raped by an upperclassman. Corman is no stranger to thorny issues: An earlier novel, Kramer vs. Kramer, took on divorce and child custody; and here again, Corman focuses not only on the event itself, but on its wider implications for the victim, the perpetrator, and for the community as a whole.
When we first meet Elizabeth Mason and her family, she is five, and her parents are intensely concerned with placing her in "the correct private school." The Masons live in Manhattan, where Laura, the mother, runs an upscale home furnishings magazine, and Ben, Elizabeth's father, is a folk art dealer. The Masons are successful--they can afford to give their children, Elizabeth and the younger Josh, every advantage, including expensive schools, music lessons,
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