But she is also a gay offspring of vaguely gay-baiting parents, and a woman conditioned from childhood to conceive of her beauty, her sensuality and her intelligence wholly in comparison to men. She is, after all, an American, in whom certain advantages are supposed to inhere automatically. Living in a New York City neighborhood left in disarray by the combination of partial gentrification and increasing poverty that overtook it during the Reagan-Bush years, she is acutely aware of herself as a child of middle-class Jews, “the kind that could pass up just as easily as down.” Her word-processing job and visits to her parents help her maintain an illusion of tradition and stability. “I mean something different in the World than I mean in my world,” says Anna O., whose fractured identity is scattered in shards throughout the poignant self-analysis that comprises “Empathy.” She seems to exist only in relationship to her surroundings, or other people.

In four previous novels and her current, “Empathy,” Schulman has articulated an ongoing dialogue in which her fictional stand-ins, most often young gay women obsessed with cultural and political concerns, yearn to speak the language of their time, and to learn what actions will suffice in a chaotic world. They strain to understand their lives in the context of global changes and local upheavals. They grasp at love as they watch their friends and lovers die. The characters in novelist Sarah Schulman’s fiction struggle to come to terms with their identity in a contemporary urban landscape that has grown increasingly apocalyptic and implausible. If personality is just an adjustment to stress, we may all be the result of the crises we survive.

Empathy by Sarah Schulman