NONFICTION - May 28, 1995

BLOWN SIDEWAYS THROUGH LIFE by Claudia Shear (The Dial Press: $15.95; 128 pp.) Claudia Shear has had 65 jobs, and this monologue describes several of them: Nude model, waitress, toilet cleaner, girl Friday for Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival and, most memorably, telephone operator at a whorehouse on East 49th Street. Lest the reader assume that writing a book has lifted Shear out of a life of work, the very last line: “And this book is job number sixty-six.” Everything about it is matter of fact, except a flash here and there of terror or insight, otherwise known as weakness. At the end of the section on the whorehouse, Shear writes: “When I was a child I was like Lear. I thought, I will do such things. “

People this tough make you cry for them, and that’s part of what this author does. In the few instances where she tries to transform her working life into something different, the relentlessness of the effort only cuts deeper: “Climbing the dunes of subway steps up and out, the crunch of trash underfoot sounds like sand, the concrete glints and hints at treasure.” The “Tips for Customers” (in restaurants) should be Xeroxed for posterity, especially, “Don’t complain to the manager . . . the subject of your criticism will be fired. Now, we’re talking about a dinner you ate balanced against a person’s job.” “Most people,” Shear writes, “have a class, they have a place . . . but there is also another kind of life . . . one is jerked out of one’s stratum, and one lives crosswise for the rest of time.”