SOURCE: "Maggie Moran, Anne Tyler's Madcap Heroine: A Game-Approach to Breathing Lessons," in Essays in Literature, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, Fall, 1991, pp. 276-87.

In the following essay, Koppel discusses the game playing in Tyler's Breathing Lessons and the assertion that a balance between game playing and responsibility is necessary to live successfully.

When Maggie Moran, a nursing assistant in a home for the elderly and the central character of Anne Tyler's novel Breathing Lessons, tries to locate a favorite patient during a fire drill, the resulting fiasco bears more than a coincidental resemblance to a slapstick scene from an I Love Lucy episode. Maggie ends up in a part of the home off-limits to her and leaps into a laundry cart to conceal herself when she thinks she detects the approach of a supervisor:

Absurd, she knew it instantly. She was cursing herself even as she sank among the...