Reasons to Live/Self-Help

...Here is a typical section from "How to Be an Other Woman": "He tells you his wife's name...

...Very artful, indeed...

...In "Go Like This" a forty-two-yearold woman chooses to commit suicide rather than die a slow death of breast cancer — as much for her husband and daughter, she thinks, as for herself...

...She is the author of a novel...

...In "Celia Is Back," a man is derailed and rerailed by equally irrelevant details, the first a Jello pudding contest, the second a sign in a beauty parlor window reading: "Celia, formerly of Mr...

...What is intellectual property law?' " You won't find prescriptions for how to solve your problems here, but you might learn how to survive them a bit more gracefully...

...She decides to write the account of the weeks leading up to her suicide on Bastille Day...

...For Hempel, the answer is obvious...

...The stories are less successful when we have to piece together the events from driblets and hints...

...Lorrie Moore also works in the province of bright young or youngish women running from the pain of knowing themselves and the world in the nine stories in Self-Help...

...To her credit, Ms...

...The trouble with many of Hempel's aimless heroines (and occasional heroes) is that they're too strong to let themselves go and too cynical to believe in strength...

...The heroines know it...

...A strange alchemy results in something resembling the future tense that lends them an odd feeling of cause and effect...

...The stories are ironic because they teach you what you already know and wish you didn't: how to fall out of love, how to avoid talking about your parents' divorce, how to watch your mother grow frail and die...

...it is one last fling at permanency...

...Something is about to happen...

...Limbo seems like the only honest place to be in these stories...

...No, she is doomed to be both determined and doubt-ridden...

...Earth Angels, and, with Thomas Cahill, A Literary Guide to Ireland...

...the people who know them know it...

...DICK HOWARD teaches in the philosophy department at the-State University of New York, Stony Brook...

...20 September 1985: 505 This obsessive collection of facts can be seen as a key to Hempel's sensibility...

...Even at its best, Hempel's prose lacks the neurasthenic charge of Joan Didion's...

...Didion uses the agglomeration of concrete details to much the same end, but manages to infuse the facts themselves with a simultaneous wonder and irony, to convince the reader that everything she describes, from a hydraulic power plant to a waiter in Zipaquira, Colombia, is a singular phenomenon with its own body of lore...

...If, as in "Beg, SI Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep," an energizing crisis arrives and anomie slips into madness, the heroine just bobs up again into common unhappiness: she has a psychological air bladder that floats her to the surface but no further...

...Hempel's successes come from another direction...

...The six how-to stories are told in the second person and derive much of their narrative tension from the pull between the general and the specific inherent in the second person...

...ABIGAIL L. ROSENTHAL teaches in the department of philosophy at Brooklyn College...

...He tells you he likes you a lot...

...Hempel continually strives for, and sometimes manages to find, the poetry and raw humor in meaninglessness...

...The large wheel of life is turning and within it the small cog of the heroine's psyche...

...You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm...

...The combination of the second person and the present tense adds another, unexpected, dimension to the stories...

...Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale," is the opening line of "How...

...The hope in these stories springs from the same source as their hopelessness — the irrevocability of the cycle, which may trap you but keeps going on...

...Still, she continues to banter even though she knows why she's doing it: it keeps her mind off the abyss...

...These stories seem to present their heroines with a variety of options, but they zero in to invalidate all but the chosen one...

...The alternately wise and wise cracking narrators provide ironic commentary, letting us in on the action and on a store of little-known facts: that Bob Dylan's mother invented White-Out, that insects fly between raindrops, that blueeyed white cats are usually deaf, and cats that can hear will yawn when you run your finger along the teeth of a comb (this doesn't work...

...the story is unfolding just as you read it...

...Even Freud said that's all anyone can ask for._____________________________ REVIEWERS GEORGE M. MARSDEN is a professor of history at Calvin College in Michigan, and the author of several books including Fundamentalism and American Culture and Modem America...

...Some of them seem merely to be vehicles designed to transport us to the oracular punchline, but fail to lend it resonance along the way...

...Most of the stories in Reasons to Live open after a crisis to find the narrator standing, shell-shocked, amidst the rubble of her life...

...DAWN ANN DRZAL «5 an assistant editor at a New York publishing house...

...No matter how many ways she turns a phrase, no matter how many points of view she assumes, she can make only one choice, but that doesn't mean she'll feel it was the right one, or even the only one...

...He is the author of Getting Saved from the Sixties...

...I tried it...

...While this formulation may seem harsh and hopeless, the characters in these two collections of stories, would be more than willing to settle for it...

...That's what Moore's characters try to do, love and work as best they can and keep going on...

...Six of these are written in the how-to mode, which they exploit and subvert to very wise and funny ends...

...She is an intellectual, property lawyer...

...Her Tiarrators are collectors of small, ironic udbits, and Hempel seems to put forth the theory that the world is just a random assemblage of these trifles — some poignant, some beautiful, some amusing, but none deriving meaning from their arrangement...

...The clever wordplay in these stories is a defense doomed to failure — life goes on, her mother will grow Commonweal: 506 senile with age, her husband will leave her or she will leave him...

...This emotional distance is compensated for by the appeal to the reader's vanity...

...In the former story, we suffer along with a woman visiting her best friend, who is dying of cancer, in a California hospital room...

...Only when you've reached the end does it become clear that the story has unfolded as it always has, and you have had no effect on it at all...

...In her one fullyrealized, moving story, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,'' and to a lesser extent in the fine "Beg, SI Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep" (knitting instructions), her disaffected tone works to lend depth to her narrator...

...Therefore, the stories prevent the full suspension of disbelief and strike the reader as artful, as less than wholly "true...

...Also like Hempel's heroines, they are smartasses, addicted to, even controlled by, obsessive wordplay...

...It is Patricia...

...The cool monologue is revealed for what it is — noise to drown out pain and fear...

...This conflict can never be resolved fully because "you" means "you, the reader," and there is no avoiding the recognition that "you, the reader" are not participating in the events of the story but only in the emotions they arouse...

...Dawn Ann Drzal THE MOST basic aim of psychoanalysis, Freud said, is "transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness...

...This story is about me," some part of you says, "it must be interesting...

...STEVEN TIPTON teaches sociology of religion and ethics at Emory University...

...When Trudy in '' Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love" finishes a humorous monologue about slippers, her boss Comments succinctly, "You're depressed...

...Only because we suffer with her can we come to understand and pardon the tactics she uses to avoid feeling pain, but we do come to understand...

...ROBERT JONES works for a major publisher in New York City...

...We believe in her fear, her love of life, and her psychological fragility...

...Moore parodies the convention of the omniscient "self-help" narrator who will guide you though the mine field of life: her narrators know no more than her readers, and when they plug real data into slick formulas, the results are both poignant and amusing...

...Go Like This" is a wrenching story, tender and brave and relentlessly honest...

...For them wordplay is a mental tic, a diversion, a spillway for unassimilable pain...

...They are intelligent, clever women one imagines as compulsive takers of magazine quizzes — "What's Your Love Quotient?7' — even though they know how silly they are...

...When he says, 'How do you feel about that?' don't say 'Ridiculous' or 'Get the hell out of my apartment.' Prop your head up with one hand and say: 'It depends...

...Although the tone of Hempel's spare, first person narratives (the exception is the third person' 'Today Will Be a Quiet Day") varies from the almost Southern Gothic flavor of "Breathing Jesus" to the silly/surreal "Celia Is Back" to the full and touching "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried," they share a veneer of detachment...

...Edward, has rejoined our staff.'' Can sanity exist in a senseless world...

...They take place in earthquake and landslide country, where stability is revealed to be a necessary delusion...

...The wordplay shows through for what it is — a woefully inadequate hedge against death...

...Self-Help is a funny, compassionate course in what you can't help knowing no matter how hard you try...

...SUSAN CAHILL edited Motherhood: A Reader for Men and Women, and Women & Fiction...

...In the first story, "In a Tub," the heroine chooses a long soak in a hot bath over the comforts of God when a huge scare brings home to her the fact of her mortality...

...While it is sometimes witty, the view of the world as absurd deprives the stories of emotional power...

...Moore's heroines, like Hempel's, know better, but it doesn't do them much good either...