Fallen Arches

By Martha Duffy

Pity the poor Paris pansies. Blooming in their flower beds, they disturb our heroine; to her, it seems, their "triangular, black centers boast the mustache of Hitler himself." But then Berie Carr, the narrator of Lorrie Moore's new novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (Knopf; 148 pages; $20), is someone who can find likenesses everywhere -- trees like candelabras, pastries like art. She asks her Bohemian friend Marguerite, "Do you think the Venus de Milo looks like Nicolas Cage?"

Berie is in Paris with her husband. Theirs is a touchy relationship; she feels she cannot reach him. She also has a lot of time on her hands, and when not visiting Jim Morrison's grave or munching a coffee-and-chocolate pastry called a divorce, she looks back wistfully on the summer when she was 15 and innocently in love with a sexually precocious girl named Sils.

They worked at an amusement park called Storyland, where pretty Sils played Cinderella and Berie, smart and shifty, was a cashier. When Sils got pregnant, Berie stole from the till to pay for an abortion. Eventually she was caught and shipped off by her parents to boarding school. The girls drifted apart; Berie went to college; and Sils was last heard of as a letter carrier in Hawaii.

It's a wisp of a story, tricked out with an unbearable weight of literary pretension. None of this would matter if it weren't clear that Moore can write well. In Daniel, the husband, she comes close to a real comic creation. Something of a boor, he pronounces French as if it were Spanish. He calls his fallen arches "fallen archness." The bad joke is all too apt -- it points up the coyness that flaws the book. At one point in her unanchored musings, Berie says, "The italics are losing their italics." Not with her around.