‘That Anteroom of Girlhood’ : WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL? <i> By Lorrie Moore (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 148 pp.)</i>

Benoit-Marie Carr, remembering her 15th year and about to tell the story of it, announces what sounds like the considerable disadvantage that, “My childhood had no narrative.” She comments that that time of her life “was all just a combination of air and no air,” a “waiting for life to happen,” having “no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet.” It was, she says at last, “just a space with some people in it.”

And there you are. If I were a teacher of fiction writing--dread but conceivable thought--I’d point my students to this page and say, there, that’s what fiction is about, that’s what it is--a space with some people in it--that’s where you start, where you go from and where you end.

Which, obviously, is a fact already perfectly well known to the extraordinarily talented Lorrie Moore, making it only more puzzling that she allows to be woven into this, her fourth book and second novel, as many thin and people-less strands as she does.

What Benoit-Marie, Berie for short, really has to tell here is the story of her intense friendship with the wonderfully named Silsby Chaussee. Inseparable from age 9, the girls reached 15--in 1972, the novel’s pivotal year--at stages of physical development so different that Sils “looked twenty,” while Berie “looked twelve.” Suffice it to say that Berie envied and treasured not only the womanly loveliness of Sils, but also the tough confidence with which she smoked, swore and swaggered around home, school and town--or that when Sils got pregnant that year (via Mike, a tough local boy with a Harley), Berie stood by her dear friend as few others might, stealing the $500 needed for an abortion and, herself, paying the considerable price.

As long as Lorrie Moore follows her own implied dictum and keeps the space of her book honestly peopled, she presents the lives of Sils and Berie and the atmosphere of the Upstate New York town they lived in with a subtle, moving and often outright brilliance. With seeming ease she offers up such details as Sils and Berie’s habit of meeting in the cemetery behind Sil’s house (“at the grave of Esterina Foster, a little girl who had died in 1932”), where the two would smoke and talk and “lean forward and brush hair from each other’s face;” or the fleeting, tiny, but typically Mooreian detail that Berie’s distracted but idealistic father, visiting Germany in 1930, “had seen Hitler in a hotel lobby and was dazzled.”

When the scene moves away from home, though, especially in those interpolated sections of the novel set years later (when Berie is to be married--and Sils still has no prospects), Moore’s pages often grow thin, occupied not so much by people as by oddly half-emerged attitudes, stances or themes seemingly there for some kind of imagined but unnecessary support.

The author reveals signs of a lack of confidence in her material with a sometimes self-conscious leaning, for example, on symbol. Often enough, Moore’s symbols work beautifully--the cemetery lying behind Sil’s house, or the girls’ hometown being named Horsehearts because, during the French and Indian War (the town is near the Canadian border), slaughtered horses were thrown into the local ponds, their eviscerated hearts “buried on Miller Hill just south.” Backdrop symbols of danger, brutality and threat like these are sometimes interesting in themselves and can add texture to the book; yet the considerable and engaging personages of Berie and (even less so) of Sils don’t need them. Moore usually throttles back in time to avoid excess, controlling her tone and keeping the ring of her story true, but there are interesting moments when even she seems to telegraph suggestions of doubt about her judgment.

Small quibbles and doubts, perhaps, in a book capable of being as rich, articulate and evocative of its characters’ life as this one is. Few writers can hope to achieve effects so simple, perfectly timed and moving as Moore’s having Sils, confused and in pain just after her abortion, almost forgetting to turn around and wave back at Berie as she’s driven off on Mike’s motorcycle; or as the exquisitely understated pathos of Berie’s feelings on the deaths of her father and of her grandmother; or, at the thematic heart of the novel, as the sorrow that comes simply through growing into adulthood and losing the things--as Berie loses Sils--that once seemed to have been perfect.

All the more disappointing, then, are the inexplicably supercilious scenes of Berie in Paris with her two-dimensional husband, or of Berie, in that same city, feverishly museum-hopping, name-dropping and editorializing about the evils of the French while in the company of her cipher-friend Marguerite, a trendy and paper-thin wisp who seems to have been conjured out of air just to make a certain number of pages of these time-and-space-filling, fashion-plate scenes possible.

Berie’s adult unhappiness, as if hardly a part of the same book, is in great part penuriously and immaturely rendered, for reasons that one can only guess at, or theorize about only at much greater length than this. The novel’s end, though, for a 10-year high school reunion, returns to Horsehearts, where Lorrie Moore also returns once more to the genuine article, palpably filling her space again with people, touching on one perfect detail after another, and moving her readers by an art woven out of the unpretentious stuff of life.

Berie, at this point, says something extraordinary, and perhaps also relevant to the weaknesses--and the great strengths--of Lorrie Moore’s novel. Although engaged to be married, Berie finds herself looking less to the future than wanting the past back again, wanting not adulthood but “another part of my life: that anteroom of girlhood, with . . . anticipation playing in the heart like an orchestra tuning and warming, the notes unwed and fabulous and crazed--I wanted it back!--those beginning sounds, so much more interesting than the piece itself.”

The reader will want the same: to have back the authentic parts that ring so true, the parts at the starting out more than the whole piece itself.