Bogeys in the Closet

MEET CONRAD JARRETT, ordinary American High School kid with A grades and a varsity letter. He's a shy, quiet isolated type of guy--the kind that's always worrying about being polite, maintaining control, not offending anyone. But there is something wrong with Conrad Jarrett. At eighteen he's a failed suicide with red-scarred wrists to prove it and eight months in a hospital to show for it. Conrad is scared of something inside himself, something that makes him feel like a piece of glass on the verge of shattering. What Conrad is afraid of and how he gets beyond this fractured, brittle sense of identity is the crux of Judith Guest's first novel, Ordinary People.

Skillfully and honestly, Guest chronicles a family of ordinary people--white, middle class, Suburban--whose lives are rocked by a pair of extraordinary events that aren't supposed to happen to followers of the middle-class rule book. Here is a struggle between people trying to come to terms with emotions and occurrences they cannot control or justify, that polarize as well as irretrievably connect.

The struggle revolves around Conrad, who has just returned from eight months in a mental hospital and is faced with the task of re-entry into society. Sensitively and compassionately--almost as if she too has been there--Guest draws Conrad as he wakes up for the first time in his old, but now somewhat unfamiliar, room and realizes that tossed out with his color prints of the Cubs, the White Sox and the Bears are his guiding principles, his beliefs, and his old reasons for getting up in the morning. The sense of identity he used to wear around so comfortably just doesn't seem to fit anymore. Faced with an overwhelming sense of emptiness and panic, Conrad urges himself to "Get the motions right. The motives will follow."

What does follow is a battle of nerves and feelings, for both Conrad and his parents. Each twists and turns under an ever increasing sense of guilt and failure until in the end, all three move in their separate ways from denial and repression to an acceptance and forgiveness of what is, rather than what should have been.

Guest's novel is not perfect by any means. It lacks the polish and tightness of more experienced writers. Her style is pedestrian--at times downright clumsy--perhaps a little too ordinary to be interesting. At points minor characters go flat, the tone varies confusingly, and it becomes hard to determine who's speaking.

Still, whatever Ordinary People lacks in sophistication is made up for by the book's vitality and feeling. Its ambitious attempt at capturing a person's pain, anger and joy as he seeks to know himself--an exercise which all too often descends into maudlin intellectual wandering. But Guest succeeds in laying out what it's like to open the closet of one's mind, sort out what's there, throw out what doesn't fit and stack up the rest. As Conrad's psychiatrist points out to him.

"Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent. It is plain and simple reduction of feeling. If you can't feel pain, you aren't gonna feel anything else, either. And the world is full of pain. Also joy, evil. Goodness. Horror and love. You name it, it's there. Sealing yourself off is just going through the motions, get it?"

Guest seems to know that the bogeys in the closet aren't so terrible once you've faced them. And by having accepted this, her characters find the peace for which they're searching.