By this I mean the opiate novels, once on the fringe, that corporate bottom-liners have made mainstream. This difficulty is exacerbated for the serious novelist - and Lamott is a serious novelist - by the tsunami of what used to be called genre fiction. Chance on an unbelieving clod,Īnd the ultimate rejoinder is ready at hand: ''Listen, dummy, it actually happened!'' Whereas in a novel, readers who won't suspend their disbelief simply won't suspend it there's nothing a writer In nonfiction the artist can be as outlandish as he or she wants to be. The limitations of ''Crooked Little Heart'' may have something to do with the different requirements of fiction and nonfiction. Lose my arms in some tragic accident and will have to go to court and diaper my son using only my mouth and feet and the judge won't think I've done a good enough job and will put Sam in a foster home.'' Why wouldĪn intelligence so lively in this world invent another universe in which so little happens? to imagine that poverty will force her and the child ''to live in a tenement house where the rats will bite our heads while we sleep, or that I will Joyous 1993 rant on single motherhood, Lamott wakes up, pregnant, at 3 A.M. In ''Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year,'' her

What happened to the giggly, absurd character who wrote two popular nonfiction books? That mind set out for parts exotic and also highly, fiendishly familiar. So what else is new? And isn't it nice we're having weather? A mother slams her daughter's $200 tennis racket through a So why is there so little movement in ''Crooked Little Heart,'' Anne Lamott's own new novel? Beloved old people die of stomach cancer, adolescents are ungrateful. On Writing and Life.'' As she then put it, ''Drama must move forward and upward, or the seats on which the audience is sitting will become very hard and uncomfortable. Rama is the way of holding the reader's attention,'' Anne Lamott wrote in her witty and openhearted 1994 primer, ''Bird by Bird: Some Instructions More on Anne Lamott from The New York Times Archives.What's that man off the bus up to in this novel about a widow and her daughter AugLike Watching Tennis By BENJAMIN CHEEVER

Crooked little heart