BOOKS

ARTS FAIR/BOOKS

Love Handles

James Wolcott

Self-Help (Knopf), a maiden collection of stories by Lorrie Moore, reads like an instruction manual for young women used roughly by love and still mending. To these bandaged sisters Moore offers a trayful of pick-me-ups. In "How to Be an Other Woman," she advises using humor to paper over the hurts. "The next time he phones, he says: 'I was having a dream about you and suddenly I woke up with a jerk and felt very uneasy.' Say: 'Yeah, I hate to wake up with jerks.' " An alternative to waking up with jerks is to hightail it home alone. "Somehow—in a restaurant or a store—meet an actor.... Sleep with him once and ride home at 5 a.m. crying in a taxicab. Or: don't sleep with him. Kiss him good night at Union Square and run for your life." Moore's advice to aspiring writers is equally brisk and flighty. "Decide faces are important. Write a villanelle about pores." And take no static from teachers who tsk, tsk over your stories' lack of plot. "When you are home, in the privacy of your own room, faintly scrawl in pencil beneath his black-inked comments: 'Plots are for dead people, pore-face.' " In Self-Help, Lorrie Moore is sharp, flicking, on-target; she leaves those pore-faces as peppered as a dart board.

In chatty spots, Self-Help sounds like Cynthia Heimel's Sex Tips for Girls with an icicle through its heart. "When he climbs onto the covers, naked and hot for you, unleash your irritation in short staccato blasts. Show him your book. Your aspirin. Your clock on the table reading 12:45." Yet it would be a mistake to write this book off as merely another bit of how-to humor about the dating scene and taming the male beast. Lorrie Moore, who was bom in 1957, is part of that remarkable constellation of promising young women writers which includes Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, Susan Minot, Linda Svendsen, T. Gertler, and, though she's a bit older than the others, Bobbie Ann Mason—a post-napalm, post-barricades group that has retreated from apocalypse now and quietly pitched its tent in the living room, where the TV is always on and the rustle of a cellophane bag fills the snack bowl with greasy chips. Just as Bobbie Ann Mason had mother and daughter camped in front of an old movie in Shiloh and Other Stories, Moore parks the mother and daughter of her story ' 'The Kid's Guide to Divorce" in front of a late-night horror film.

The mummy will be knocking down telephone poles, lifting them up, and hurling them around like Lincoln Logs.

Wow, all wrapped up and no place to go, your mother will say.

Cuddle close to her and let out a long, low, admiring Neato.

Mom is the port from which all vessels sail in Self-Help. Men may bounce in and out of your bed like trampoline artists; friends may betray you by blabbing the awful truth (when someone asks the author what she writes about, her drunken roommate blurts, "Oh, my god, she always writes about her dumb boyfriend"); cats may swish their tails to ward off your affection; but Mom— Mom is a permanent dent in the sofa. Nearly all of the non-jokey stories in Self-Help reach out toward Mom, sometimes into the ghostly air. "What Is Seized" is about a mother whose mind comes unstuck after a mastectomy and the desertion of her husband. "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)" is a timemachine trip in which the narrator, beginning with 1982, counts down each year until she arrives at the groaning moment of her own birth, the first tearing of flesh from flesh. "There is a tent of legs, a sundering of selves, as you both gasp blindly for breath." And the concluding story, "To Fill," is about a woman who flips out and, after running a steak knife through her husband, lands in the same hospital her mother haunts. They meet in their bathrobes at the coffee shop. Motherhood is martyrdom in Self-Help, and with all the book's rolling eyeballs and Lady Macbeth knife work it's a relief to hit a rest stop like "The Kid's Guide to Divorce," where hysteria is kept under a lid. "Bitterness and art are close," Moore writes in "What Is Seized," but in "How to Be an Other Woman" she observes, "People will do anything, anything for a really nice laugh." Fortunately for the reader of Self-Help, the laughter lightens the bitter art—makes it easier to carry Mom on your bent back.

Lorrie Moore is a nervy, still-maturing writer, and her stories don't have the shine and finesse of gemstones; they're rough, nicked, unfinished. Like so many writers of her generation, she's breathed in the chalk dust of creativewriting classes (she currently teaches English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison) and tends to rely too much on tactics, personal aches, and similes that seem to have crept like mites out of John Hawkes's mattress: "When he follows you to the door, buzzing at your side like a fly by a bleeding woman. .."; "And then he fell asleep, his snores scratching in the dark like zombies. " Sentences like these smack of litmajor showing off, stuff meant to wow the teach and make solemn believers out of one's fellow students. But if SelfHelp is apprentice work, it's the work of a sorcerer's apprentice—with the proper ingredients, Lorrie Moore can cast a cruel, mischievous spell. "You have broken up with your boyfriend. You now go out with men who, instead of whispering 'I love you,' shout: 'Do it to me, baby.' This is good for your writing." So that's how it works. "Do it to me, baby." Cut this kid some rhythm.