NONFICTION - Oct. 24, 1993

LIFE FOR ME AIN’T BEEN NO CRYSTAL STAIR by Susan Sheehan. (Pantheon: $21; 174 pp.) “Of all the people I have written books about,” writes Sheehan, New Yorker staff writer and author of “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?” (Sheehan’s account of a schizophrenic patient’s treatment at Creedmore Hospital in New York, which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction), “Crystal Taylor is my favorite.” Sheehan obviously cares a great deal about Crystal Taylor and the other nearly half-million foster children in the United States. The story she tells reveals generations of mistreatment, individual and institutional. Homelessness and drug addiction are passed from Crystal’s grandmother to her mother (who has seven children, all of them in foster care), to Crystal, who becomes a mother at age 14 and whose son also spends his childhood bounced between institutions and homes and his own mother. But a strange distant tone pervades the book, a tone one might recognize as distinctly “New Yorker style,” letting the facts, piled aggressively and plainly on top of each other, speak for themselves. It is one thing to realize that shootings and rape and child abuse are routine daily life for some people; it’s another when the style creates a flatness in the texture of these individual’s lives; when giving up your son is the same as getting shot in the hand by your boyfriend is the same as watching your father beat up your mother.