What Men Get Away With, Just Because There Are So Few of Them : MY LIFE AND DR. JOYCE BROTHERS A Novel in Stories <i> by Kelly Cherry (Algonquin Books: $14.95; 221 pp.) </i>

Imagine spending a few hours with one of your closest friends, talking about your life, discussing all the lovers who’ve disappointed you, revealing your unhappiness with therapists who have failed to explain to you why, in this culture of rapid, inexorable progress, you shouldn’t feel a dislocation of spirit and personality.

In the course of your confessional session, you disclose the story of your incestual family life. You discuss the inability of your parents to achieve any notable happiness, your brother’s alcoholic destructiveness, your longing for a child and a mate. You speak of friends, of hopes, and of failures. You reveal yourself deeply, in other words, and you do so with biting wit and uncommonly frank self-analysis.

Such is the tone of Kelly Cherry’s fourth novel, “My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers,” which has been subtitled, “A Novel in Stories.” Each chapter in this novel could stand alone as a separate short story and has been given its own title--such as “My Brother: A Biography,” or “The Parents” and “What I Don’t Tell People”--and yet the sum total is a fluid, dove-tailing account of the plight of a middle-aged, unmarried woman named Nina who understands how the numbing jargon of self-help, so prevalent in our culture and epitomized by the philosophy of Dr. Joyce Brothers, can do nothing to alleviate a sense of deep-rooted alienation and loneliness.

Nina, who narrates her own story in a confidential, intimate, wise-cracking voice, is a Southerner transported to Madison, Wis. Her lover, Cliff, has recently abandoned her for someone else and now sends her letters asking why they can’t be friends, adding insult to injury. She has joined a survivors of incest group to help her come to terms with the bitter legacy of her brother’s seduction. The most reliable, comforting presence in her life is a tiny dog and a friend named Rajan, of whom she writes, “America was full of Old Men pretending to be New Men and here was a New Man who didn’t know it.” Rajan can provide sympathetic friendship, but what Nina is really searching for is love.

“I know what it is I am afraid of,” Nina reflects, thinking of her lost lover Cliff. “If he never cared about me, really cared, then nobody has ever loved me. . . . If he didn’t love me, I have been alone forever and that is how it will always be.”

Like a child afraid of abandonment, Nina worries that her future will be bereft of love and companionship. To her credit, she does not succumb to self-pity. Instead, much of the book is devoted to her analysis of how she has arrived at this point.

“Men are all victimizers,” she concludes. “They just can’t stand to recognize that. Men tell women that ‘No one can victimize you except yourself,’ and the woman, upon hearing this, ‘becomes tough and unvulnerable.’ But ‘The tougher women get, the more they get discounted.’ That, unfortunately, is the catch 22.”

As always, families have a great deal to do with the sorts of relationships that later ensue. The chapter on her brother explains how his sexual victimization of her accounts for many of her feelings: “In the beginning, my brother was the most wonderful man in the world. . . . When I grew up, I was going to be just like him, only female. When I grew up, I was going to be so beautiful that he would fall in love with me forever. I am not sure at what point he became unable to recognize that other people besides himself existed. He may have been born that way.”

By coming to terms with her brother, she faces her own complicity. Nina is such a generous, exuberant personality that even when she’s taking men to account, there’s a tremendously ironic wit at work:

“We are such good little girls, all of us, reluctant to wreck our hopes for the future, no matter how unrealistic they may be, on the shoals of calling men to account for themselves. What they get away with, just because there are so few of them. Think of it: Women are waiting in line for the privilege of taking care of broken-down drunks like my brother. Anyone who doesn’t think men get away with murder should remember that on ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ Beaver’s last name was Cleaver. That made him Beaver Cleaver. What does this say to America?”

Like many women her age, Nina feels the biological clock ticking away. She dreams of having a child but is unsuccessful at her attempt to become artificially inseminated. Yet toward the end of the story, Nina does obtain a baby when her brother’s 13-year-old daughter, Babett, becomes pregnant, and the baby, when it is born, is handed over to Nina to rear. It’s to Cherry’s credit that she avoids wrapping up her story neatly with another happy ending that would have Nina paired off with the perfect New Man.

Many years ago, D. H. Lawrence wrote that the future of the world wouldn’t be determined between nations but in the relationship between men and women. I believe he was speaking of power, and of the subtle (and not so subtle) ways in which one-half of the world is subservient to the other. The tenuous ground between the sexes is littered with the corpses of those who did not survive the battle. But we keep plunging ahead, trying to achieve some kind of parity. In the process, many bitter tales are told. This isn’t one of them. “My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers,” is far too witty, too savvy, too lyrical and compassionate to resort to bitterness. It’s not an easy trick, but Cherry has performed the admirable feat of taking hackneyed fates and infusing them with tremendous freshness.