to imagine that poverty will force her and the child ''to live in a tenement house where the rats will bite our heads while we sleep, or that I will lose my arms in some tragic accident and will have to go to court and diaper my son using only my mouth and feet and the judge won't think I've done a good enough job and will put Sam in a foster home.'' Why would an intelligence so lively in this world invent another universe in which so little happens? In ''Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year,'' her joyous 1993 rant on single motherhood, Lamott wakes up, pregnant, at 3 A.M. What happened to the giggly, absurd character who wrote two popular nonfiction books? That mind set out for parts exotic and also highly, fiendishly familiar. So what else is new? And isn't it nice we're having weather? A mother slams her daughter's $200 tennis racket through a wall, a midlist writer has a setback. So why is there so little movement in ''Crooked Little Heart,'' Anne Lamott's own new novel? Beloved old people die of stomach cancer, adolescents are ungrateful. ''Drama is the way of holding the reader's attention,'' Anne Lamott wrote in her witty and openhearted 1994 primer, ''Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.'' As she then put it, ''Drama must move forward and upward, or the seats on which the audience is sitting will become very hard and uncomfortable.
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