SURVIVING LITERARY SUICIDE. By Jeffrey Berman. Univ. of Massachusetts Press. 290 pp. $60 hardcover, $18.95 paper

Surviving Literary Suicide is an important book about suicide and the psychological impact of its literary portrayals. A professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany, Berman assigned his graduate students writings about suicide by six authors (Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, William Styron, and Virginia Woolf), and had the students keep diaries recording their responses to the works.

Not one to celebrate self-inflicted death, Berman nonetheless captures well, and in detail, the profound despair experienced by the authors. Most powerful for me, though, were the strength, insight, and humanity of the students' responses to what they read. Here, for instance, is one student's outrage at how the cerebral dissections of Plath's life and work overlook her suffering: "I picture them fighting over the souvenirs of her demise . . . and forgetting the person who went through the infernal pain. Readers may reify Plath, and the 'cost' to them is that they forget to be human, forget that their subject of study was also a person whose life hurt so much that she was forced to end it."

Works that glorify suicide may pose risks to readers, but Berman reminds us of the affirmation of life that can come from great literature. One student wrote of how Styron's wonderful, and wonderfully influential, Darkness Visible (1990) reached through her own depression: "William Styron, the one who made it through, the one who did not succumb. While I still identify more with Anne Sexton, it is you toward whom I gravitate because you are breathing." Berman has written an excellent book. --Kay Redfield Jamison