NONFICTION - Sept. 17, 1995

HIGH TIDE IN TUCSON: Essays From Now or Never by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins: $22; 273 pp.) Buster is a manic-depressive hermit crab that Kingsolver brought, unwittingly, home to Tucson with her from the Bahamas. In trying to understand his mania, Kingsolver, who trained as a biologist before becoming a writer, posits that he is responding to the pattern of the tides in prehistoric Arizona: “When Buster is running around for all he’s worth, I can only presume it’s high tide in Tucson. With or without evidence, I’m romantic enough to believe it. This is the lesson of Buster, the poetry that camps outside the halls of science.” Sometimes, I imagine, famous writers with huge followings feel the need to say to their readers: Look, I’ve created these things that appear finished, complete and whole but that doesn’t mean that I am finished, complete and whole. Then they write essays that are either cloyingly or charmingly confessional, based, as a novel really can’t be, on their insecurities and incompleteness. (“Fiction works,” writes Kingsolver, “only when the reader believes every word of it.”) These essays have something of that feel to them, and they are charming because observations of Kingsolver’s incomplete self, be it unpopular kid in high school or “imaginary mom” to her daughter, or reluctant star of the Rock Bottom Remainders (a musical group of authors), are mixed with larger observations about the real world--Buster the crab, for example.