Fairy Tales for Grown-ups : EX UTERO, By Laurie Foos <i> (Coffee House Press: $16.95; 199 pp.)</i>

It was a mere trainee, dispatched by her employers at the Coffee House Press to fill in an idle hour going through the slush pile, who first brought “Ex Utero”--this short, wonderfully deranged and stunning novel--to their attention. Perhaps the trainee picked it out because it was so short? I would have, in her place. These days, the publisher’s slush pile--that persecutory heap of unsought writings--is composed of massive, beautifully produced manuscripts, inspected and passed by the local writers group, and deadly dull. (You can communicate and communicate, but if you have nothing to say, why bother?) “Ex Utero,” simply by being comparatively short, would at least have seemed swiftly dismissible. That Laurie Foos’ “Ex Utero” was not, that it was lifted, rescued, survived to become what I think it is, a landmark in latter-day post-Communist female fiction, is the stuff of which publishing myth is made. See, miracles happen! See, a small-time, nonprofit literary outfit like the Coffee House Press in Minneapolis can come up with the goods, can justify its (threatened, naturally) grant from the NEA, can say to the good burghers of the city who have so far been generous in their funding: You see, we did it!

And all with a short novel about Rita, who loses her uterus in a shopping mall; Adele, whose vagina seals up and becomes seamless in sympathy; Lucy, who from sheer superfluity of sisterhood loses enough blood to drench the world (the burghers will shudder but be brave); and white-headed Nodderman, the TV chat-show host, viewing favorite of the shopping-mall world, who orchestrates them all.

We are of course into deep seriousness here, about the rights and conditions of women, unchanged since Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about them, but delivered in “Ex Utero” with the lightest of touches, the most elegant and mirthful focusing of fantasies, so really you would hardly know it.

Rita’s ad gets on “The Nodderman Show”: “Womb, approximately 31 years old, never been pregnant, last seen at area shopping mall near Reynolds’ shoes. Believed to be pink and about the size of a man’s fist. Anyone who has seen this womb or has any information, please call local authorities.” Women everywhere share her distress.

Men are not the oppressive enemy: Harry, the security guard at the mall, is just that--a guard, doing his best, though ineptly, to protect the shoppers in the largest mall in the United States. Male TV reporters are everywhere--the loss is a big, big story--nervously straightening ties while on the screens behind them--”searching women are running frantically through the mall with their strollers: some are down on their hands and knees with armfuls of shopping bags. Everywhere there is the sound of children screaming.”

Adele’s boyfriend--she of the seamless vagina--may try with chisel and hammer to gain proper access to her but he does so at Adele’s urgent pleading. Nodderman’s concern is generous and genuine--as is the love he quite properly inspires.

Foos’ protest is, quite properly, I think, against the human condition rather than the male sex. Her women struggle ceaselessly with their own bodies and their own desires. Rita’s hand gets run over by a stroller in the mall; she carries the stigmata through the rest of the book. Red high-heeled shoes signify everything that’s exotic. Eggs--the book’s full of eggs--are everything that consoles and comforts; the world of television has a delightful kind of sinking languor.

Foos herself? No, no children. That’s the point. Aged 27, Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, recently married and holding out against motherhood. With difficulty, one imagines. “Suddenly as a woman,” she writes of herself, “you become an entity; people around you become interested in your sex life and your reproductive capabilities. . . . It is amazing to me the way that people suddenly feel as if they have a stake in you, and feel no shame at all in asking you the most intimate of questions. ‘Are you trying?’ ‘How long do you plan to wait?’ ” Wombs, she begins to feel, are held in common. The loss of one is a loss for all.

Foos writes with a casual exactitude and an agreeable simplicity, as if for the children she does not have. She is not proud. Unashamedly, she uses short words where long would do. Writing for children is, of course, no easy matter, as any writer of juvenile tales will tell you. Complex ideas must be made easy, events and thoughts related in exact time sequence (more difficult than you would imagine) and profound skepticism overcome. To my mind, Foos applies the craft of the children’s writer to a supremely adult tale, and it is the better for it. How’s this for a kind of contained randomness and restrained hilarity:

“Somewhere in the United States, Rita is driving along an open highway with her womb on the passenger’s seat. After all these months, the womb has retained much of its original color, though the sun has bleached it a bit and it has become somewhat more dented from being banged around in the car. Twice she has thought of donating it to local museums and once she almost gave it to a woman with seven children whom she met at a shoe store. With seven children, she thought, a woman must know what a womb is really meant for.”

Perhaps we can see in “Ex Utero” the birth of a new refined notion of sisterhood--that mainstay of the feminist movement of the 1970s. If only we could all stick together, the feeling went, if only sister would speak peace unto sister, if only we could stop competing for men and see ourselves as allies against a common foe (men), why then, the struggle would succeed. But pretty soon, as happens in all the best revolutionary movements, ideologues started snapping and snarling at one another and ignoring the enemy. Sister turned on sister. (Paglia and Millet are still at it.) Foos, more sensibly, forgets the common foe and has us all on our hands and knees in the shopping mall searching for a lost womb, united in our femaleness. Female fiction, rather than feminist fiction, and fun with it: and “Ex Utero” an excellent flagship for a new wave to set sail behind.

I am also grateful to Foos’ writing group for having apparently failed to impinge upon her at all, for allowing her to proceed with so much blood, mess and honesty upon the page. Women novelists who emerge from creative writing classes are frequently so delicately skilled in their work, so well behaved, so courteous, so anxious to be liked, so smoothed out, so mulled over, so ideologically sound that it can be hard for the reader not to fall asleep. Laurie Foos has emerged from hers idiosyncratic, outrageously talented, badly behaved (dear God, she let Adele’s dog die), bloody, in no hurry to placate, jagged, immediate, incorrect and funny. So I say, Thank You, Group. She must have given you a hard time.