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By Judith Viorst
Simon and Schuster, $25
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Review by Joanne Lewis Sears
Prolific, comical, practical and wise, Judith Viorst has given us kids' books, wry poems about getting older, a very funny novel -- and some serious stuff. "Necessary Losses" (1986) showed us that growing up involves shedding some cherished illusions. In "Imperfect Control" she peels away at yet another layer of illusion -- the illusion that if we try hard enough we can stay in control of our lives.
Not that Viorst's book counsels despair at ever controlling our lives. Something of a pugnacious existentialist, she advocates fighting the good fight: "We can surmount the limits of our biology. We can rebound from even the cruelest blows." She qualifies her tough optimism, however: "We need to understand the possibilities and limits of our control. We need to balance power and surrender." In deceptively breezy prose she explains how our lives seesaw between the rigidities of too much control, the chaos of none.
Viorst is a graduate of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. An impressive bibliography attests to her solid grounding in theory and the latest research. But she translates scholarship into the quotidian, larding her text with recognizable examples, dialogue in colloquial speech. Our need to control, she says, "is so urgent and so powerful that even a parent's request to 'please pass the butter' can feel like an attack on our very being."
In ten chapters Viorst roams from infancy to the brink of death, showing us the inevitable struggle we all engage in -- reaching out for mastery over an environment that sooner or later dumps on us. Anyone who's read Viorst's "Alexander" books to their kids knows that she never blinks at reality. She fuels coping skills with gutsy, sometimes black, humor. She paints the weak as well as the strong, offering a menu of descriptive behaviors from which we can pick the ones we recognize as our very own without the onus of judgment or blame.
Acquiring necessary self-knowledge involves the swallowing of many a bitter pill. Viorst's "Imperfect Control" can surely help the medicine go down.
Joanne Lewis Sears is a freelance writer in Montecito, California.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.