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 crumpled linens. She might have got away with it,.....
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