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Susan Schaeffer Obituary

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Susan Schaeffer

Chicago, IL

March 25, 1940 - August 26, 2011

Susan Schaeffer Obituary

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Inventive Novelist, Dies at 71 By WILLIAM GRIMES Published: August 31, 2011 Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, a novelist with a gift for evoking complex characters in the grip of extreme psychological stress and physical suffering, notably in “The Madness of a Seduced Woman” and the Vietnam War novel “Buffalo Afternoon,” died on Friday in Chicago. She was 71. The cause was complications of a stroke, her husband, Neil J. Schaeffer, said. Ms. Schaeffer made a strong debut with the semiautobiographical novel “Falling,” published in 1973, which captivated critics with its brisk, entertaining stroll through very familiar fictional territory: middle-class Jewish life in Brooklyn, psychoanalysis, the struggle for self-discovery and fulfillment. Quickly, Ms. Schaeffer broadened her scope, deepened her sympathies and staked out more ambitious fictional ground. Her second novel, “Anya” (1974), a reimagining of wartime Poland and the experiences of a young woman who makes a new but unhappy life in New York, signaled another direction, confirmed in the expansive family novels “Time in Its Flight” (1978), set in 19th-century Vermont, and “Love” (1981), about two Jewish immigrant families whose story extends from the turn of the century to the late 1970s. “The Madness of a Seduced Woman” (1983) reaffirmed Ms. Schaeffer’s talent for imagining the lives of women on the brink, in this case a transplanted farm girl in 19th-century Vermont whose obsessive love for a stonecutter leads her to commit murder and attempt suicide. Her trial is more than a judicial proceeding: it raises questions of choice, instinct, destiny and female identity. Confounding readers and critics who regarded combat as the exclusive reserve of male writers, she turned to Vietnam for her eighth novel, “Buffalo Afternoon,” for which she conducted extensive interviews with veterans of the war. The story begins in Brooklyn, where an Italian-American teenager, Pete Bravado, enlists in the Army to escape an unhappy family life. He lands in hell when he is shipped off to Vietnam, and a second hell when he returns, prey to inexplicable rages and unexpungeable memories. Almost unanimously, critics praised Ms. Schaeffer for the immediacy and conviction of her combat scenes and the psychology of men under fire. In a review for The New York Times Book Review, Nicholas Proffitt, a former Vietnam bureau chief for Newsweek, called it “one of the best treatments of the Vietnam War to date, and all the more impressive for the fact that its author never heard a shot fired in anger or set foot in that country.” Ms. Schaeffer seemed somewhat surprised at the surprise.

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