BOOK REVIEW : Alcohol Recovery: The Trail Led to ‘Midwest Purgatory’ : THAT PLACE IN MINNESOTA Changing Lives, Saving Lives<i> by Ed Fitzgerald</i> Viking $18.95, 220 pages

“Come on, Fitz, it’s a drinking business,” the president of Doubleday once told Ed Fitzgerald at a business lunch. “Drink or get out.”

“I drank,” confesses Fitzgerald.

After his retirement from a long, accomplished but very wet career in the publishing business, Ed Fitzgerald was finally forced to admit that he was in trouble with the bottle--and he ended up in what he calls a “Midwestern purgatory” for abusers of drugs and alcohol.

His new book, “That Place in Minnesota,” is a confessional memoir of how Fitzgerald finally dried out and sobered up at St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Center in Minneapolis. “This time, to borrow from Richard Farina,” Fitzgerald cracks, “I was down so far the rehab looked like up to me.”

“That Place in Minnesota” falls into the genre of “recovery” books, and Fitzgerald tells a familiar story about years of denial by the drinker, the desperate intervention by a troubled family, and the promise of recovery that seems to present itself only when all hope (or, more accurately, all rationalization) is abandoned.

“Pain always hung over the Rehab like tear gas,” Fitzgerald writes, “but this was where the wounds were swabbed out with raw alcohol and it wasn’t the kind you could drink.”

“That Place in Minnesota” is not one of those bright-eyed inspirational books that shine with true belief. I waited for the moment of stunning revelation, but it never came. Rather, Fitzgerald’s book is a tough, even brutal self-appraisal that shows how tedious, how elusive, how painful and how frustrating the ordeal of recovery can be. And he resists the temptation to make himself the hero of his own story.

Indeed, Fitzgerald is the kind of hard-driving, hard-edged New Yorker that puts other people’s teeth on edge, and enjoys doing it. He cheerfully admits to be an “elitist” and “the worst kind of New York chauvinist.” Sunday was the worst day of the week at St. Mary’s, he recalls, a day that “began with a huge ache where the ‘Sunday Times’ ought to be.” Fitzgerald recalls his war experiences, his wife and family, his agonies over alcohol, but mostly he muses at length on his accomplishments in the publishing business, where he rose to the top job at the Book-of-the-Month Club: “How many people alive today could say they had created a brand-new book club, the way I had with QPB, the paperback club?” And he is a relentless name-dropper: “I remember Bennett Cerf telling me at lunch one day in the Bull & Bear at the Waldorf . . . .”

When it comes to discussing the path toward recovery at St. Mary’s, which appears to based on the teachings and techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous, Fitzgerald sometimes comes off as carping and sarcastic: “Listen, you know I hate the AA slogans,” he tells one of the group sessions at St. Mary’s. “I feel they were written by the kids in the third-grade class when the teacher was out to lunch.”

And he balks at the “Fifth Step” of Alcoholics Anonymous (“admitting ‘to God, to ourselves, and to other human beings, the exact nature of our wrongs’ ”): “Mostly I didn’t want to weasel my way out of St. Mary’s by telling a lie I hadn’t been willing to tell all the time I’d been here, so I hoped (the counselor) wouldn’t press me to declare myself a true follower of the cross of Alcoholics Anonymous.”

Fitzgerald pauses from time to time to introduce us to his fellow patients at St. Mary’s in a slightly fictionalized form: “(M)y creations,” he confides, “are neither better nor worse than . . . the wonderful people at St. Mary’s . . . were.” In fact, they’re an odd but engaging mix of sufferers who neatly illustrate the various circles of hell in the realm of alcohol and drug abuse: a young drifter whom Fitzgerald sees as a “a modern Tom Jones,” a woman who works as an office manager in a little town in Iowa, a Catholic priest from a tiny parish in South Dakota, a railroad conductor, the mayor of a small town, a Presbyterian minister from Vermont, an arrogant executive, a cattle rancher from Montana, an embittered physician from Minnesota (“If I do decide to stay, it’ll be because I can put the month to good use figuring out how I can keep that bitch of a wife of mine from getting any of my money”).

If there is a hero in “That Place,” it is Fitzgerald’s counselor at St. Mary’s, a young woman named Deborah Chapman. Once addicted to booze and Valium, she tells Fitzgerald about her own struggle toward sobriety. “(S)he had told me her own story to show me that I hadn’t invented any of these problems and certainly wasn’t entitled to take out a patent on drinking as a cure for self-pity,” Fitzgerald writes. “Debbie didn’t fight with me about AA or God. She wanted me stop drinking and to feel good about life sober. . . . She was hoping I would see that just as surely as families can split their wholeness they can solder their circles back together again.”

If all of this makes Fitzgerald seem unlovable, he redeems himself by showing us another face--the face of a sly, funny, vulnerable man who has put aside a lifetime of meticulous self-justification. Fitzgerald styles himself “an irreverent alcoholic,” as Debbie Chapman puts it, but it is precisely his irreverence, his bluntness and honesty, that make his book so appealing. “What you say is realistic,” his counselor tells him. “It tells it like it is, and people need that.”

Fitzgerald’s beloved counselor has said it all for me. I could give no more accurate or telling notice of Fitzgerald’s book.

Next: Gail Lumet Buckley reviews “The Town That Started the Civil War” by Nat Brandt (Syracuse University Press).