WILD CHILD

By John Skow

Train wrecks are marvelously entertaining in retrospect, with a guitar accompaniment. Mary Karr's God-awful childhood in a sulfurous East Texas oil town has the same sort of calamitous appeal. Her rowdy memoir The Liars' Club (Viking; 320 pages; $22.95) takes its title from the ring-tailed bosh passed around among oil workers at the American Legion bar, where her father, the champion liar, took her when she was a tadpole.

But there may be fair warning here that the author is a club member too. Would-be writers cursed with the thin childhood material of loving parents and sensible households may suspect a touch of exaggeration when, more or less safely delivered into adulthood, Karr rummages in the family attic. She's looking for the six or seven wedding rings from her mother's rumored but stubbornly unacknowledged previous marriages. What she finds is the artificial leg of her despised dead grandmother.

The choice in the book is between howling misery and howling laughter, and the reader veers toward laughter. Long passages should be read aloud: "My spankings were a kind of family sporting event ... Unless Mother managed to get me down in a corner, she would have to hold one of my wrists to keep me within flyswatter distance while she flailed in my direction. At best, she made contact about ten percent of the time ... Locked together this way, the two of us would spin from room to room with Grandma at our perimeter in her wheelchair, scolding and bitching and calling down the wrath of God on that spoiled ungrateful child."

Character takes firm hold in this wondering account of fistfights and flood, car crashes, shootings, midnight departures, drinking and mulligrubbing. It's not all funny. There are a couple of childhood rapes and too many mornings of a mother hung over and useless. But Karr and her sister Lecia survive-Lecia to marry and turn Republican, Karr to be a poet (with such collections as The Devil's Tour) and to write a drop-dead reply to the question "Ma, what was it like when you were a little girl?"