BOOK REVIEW / MEMOIR : A Modest Tale Made Worthy by the Telling : EXTRA INNINGS: A Memoir <i> by Doris Grumbach</i> ; W.W. Norton, $22, 304 pages

In this immensely likable month-by-month chronicle of her 71st year, novelist and critic Doris Grumbach invites us into the ebb and flow of her intelligently observed life.

In the greater scheme of things, not much happens--she and her companion Sybil, after much debate, finally relocate “for good” from Washington, D.C., to coastal Maine; she travels with friends to Mexico; she answers letters, reads books, looks up interesting words in the dictionary in order to ponder their meanings; she alternately worries over and celebrates her children and grandchildren; she plants an asparagus patch.

Yet there is a rhythm to this journal that is not unlike narrative poetry, a quality to the prose that is both vivid and dispassionate, a deceptively understated intensity that allows us a glimpse into both the wisdom and the impatience that accrues to seniority.

Grumbach is “old” only in the accumulation of much experience and in the small debilitations of the body. She burrows into memory even as she strives after new insight and perspective. Freed from the necessity to censor her reactions, her gaze is clear and penetrating, proving the axiom that a talented storyteller can make even the most unexpected details interesting.

Listen, for instance, to Grumbach on the nature of love:

“And then we come to amour propre , self-love, the basis of all the other kinds of love. At our core we are beings whose seamless skin contains all the machinery for generating self-love. We may feel great sparks of passion, but they will move out of us only so far and then, halted subcutaneously, they return to our center to warm us, to act as selfish fuel for the fires of our inner being. Self-love is the hidden cistern that waters us from within, a kind of secret stream which attracts us to others. We say we love them, or admire them, as the result of the overflow of those egocentric waters. But oh, how conservative we are, how seldom we open the dike of ourselves to quench the thirst of another.”

And, she continues: “. . . Then of course there is the kind of love that is usually accompanied by the awkward adverb ‘arguably’: sex, arguably a form of love. The intense, unique, private enjoyment of it, unlike the more respectable and public acts in our lives, causes prigs and puritans to think of it as noisome, messy, illicit, offensive, and disgusting. Some say it is not love at all but lust, a word they use with a sneer; others (I incline to this view, looking back over more than 50 years of pleasurably engaging in it) regard it as the main event . . . one of the few moments of light and heat at the end of torpid, humdrum days. When sex fails to animate the body, it leaves behind only scorched earth.”

Grumbach, whose previous memoir, “Coming Into the End Zone” was, she informs us, unfairly criticized by some readers for being “grumpy” in its refusal to wax benign on the process of aging, can be acerbic and irritated with foolishness. Refreshingly, she has no time to waste on euphemism or platitude. What we get from her is mostly unadorned candor, peppered with a prickly originality that perhaps calls for the coining of a new adjective: “grumby.”

On a couple of subjects, however, she’s positively lyrical. One is the irresistible personality of her granddaughter, Maya; the other is the serenity and loveliness of her chosen home in Sargentville, Me., a place situated on a cove with a view of the Atlantic.

“For the first time all day,” she writes, “the leaves on the horse chestnut, somnolent and heavy in the warm air, move quietly, unlike those of the scrubby poplars and maples, which are stirred to noisy chatter by the least wind. An abbreviated family of eider ducks make their daily advance across the Cove. . . . Black butterflies leave one firewood spire for another some distance away. Two miniscule white sails are on the reach, from this distance looking like toy boats on the pond in Central Park.

“The end of the day is signaled by this activity: the breeze from the sea, the retirement of the sun, and the finches, young jays, the doves, recovered from their siestas, at the feeder having their early supper.”

“I am prepared to see my life as a journey to arrive here,” Grumbach says with pleasure toward the end of her 12-month passage, a span of time we, as readers, regret to see end. We can only hope that, like her asparagus, thriving and maturing deep in the soil, a new harvest of her work is growing, preparing to bloom next year.