THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411051054
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL?
LORRIE MOORE
Alfred A. Knopf. 148 pp. $20.
Lorrie Moore's latest novel is just as intriguing as its title portends. Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? captures the imagination and holds fast. To many from Moore's generation (she was born in 1957), this novel is like going home. We hear chords from ``Nights in White Satin.'' We see the Desiderata poster. We smell the lemon body splash. We're there. Time and space can be transcended.
Moore is a seasoned baby boomer and the author of two collections of short stories, Self-Help and Like Life, and the novel Anagrams. She is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Her characters are witty, sarcastic and brimming with passion. Before the book is over, Moore makes us laugh and cry.
Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? is a coming-of-age story told by Berie, Moore's alter ego. It's a fairy tale gone way wrong. But it also is a story of friendship and families. It's about the loves of a lifetime.
In the end, Berie cries for the toll the years have taken: ``for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it.''
Berie is vacationing with her husband in Paris when she flashes back to past lives. We feel her restlessness. By the second page of the novel, we know the damage her husband's lack of love has caused. We see this will be no airy novel. Berie is confronting her mortality.
Melancholy thoughts take her back to her best friend, Sils, a girl we have all known. Sils is beautiful and has perfect skin. She has breasts before any of her classmates. She is the girl all the boys want to be near.
The two were inseparable then, and yet the inevitable happens. Sils meets a boy. We watch and we remember.
When first love finally finds Berie years later, who could not relive the emotions that Moore so eloquently describes in Berie's voice? ``I had no idea who either of us was; there was just the thick fog of love and bodies and whispered promises. We were child bride, child groom, each seeking the other's animal heart.''
And when that boyfriend sets out for the Alaskan pipeline, never to return, Berie goes on ``. . . never attaching in quite the same ferocious, virginal way, never with that enthralled and orphaned heart, not quite like that. . . . ''
Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? captures the mood of a generation. Moore takes us back to when our lives were radically open to possibility. And she dares brace us for what comes next. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
JOYCE RAVID
Lorrie Moore's second novel, ``Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?'',
captures the hopeful mood of a generation.
by CNB