Pubdate: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298 Author: Alex Abramovich 'MORE, NOW, AGAIN': STRAIGHT TO REHAB In 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel's ''Prozac Nation'' -- a grating, gripping memoir of her depression -- helped inaugurate the genre of 20-something autobiography and turned Wurtzel into a spokeswoman for attractively anhedonic young women. But Wurtzel squandered that cache with her follow-up, ''Bitch,'' a book intended to be a trenchant ''treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation.'' It drew attention mostly for its cover photo of Wurtzel, nude, with an airbrushed nipple and a soft-focus middle finger extended toward the reader. Detractors of ''Bitch'' can be forgiven for barely bothering to read the book -- it turns out that Wurtzel barely bothered to write it. Her new memoir, ''More, Now, Again,'' describes the circumstances surrounding the genesis of ''Bitch'': how Wurtzel sharpened her concentration by snorting upwards of 40 crushed Ritalin tablets a day, overcame writer's block with endless eightballs of cocaine, dumped the resulting mess in her long-suffering editor's lap, checked herself into rehab, then cleaned up her act, more or less. It's a testament to the editor of ''Bitch'' that for all its flaws, it didn't read like the gush you'd expect from a Ritalin addict and cokehead. Oddly, ''More, Now, Again'' does. Since the course of drug addiction gives most addiction memoirs a certain relentless similarity (you fall from humanity, you claw your way back, and in the interim you look a lot more like other addicts than like yourself), what sets the best of them apart is their prose. But Wurtzel, who tells us midway through this book that she just might be the best nonfiction writer of her generation, either writes badly on purpose or subscribes to the ''oh well, whatever'' school of sentence construction. ''I don't actually roll my eyeballs, but I do metaphorically'' is one line you'll find here. Like all addicts, Wurtzel does some bad things -- shoplifting, sleeping with married men, appearing on ''The O'Reilly Factor'' -- while stoned out of her mind, or sleepless from the same. Like all narcissists, she suffers from a basic lack of empathy. ''I've never been much interested in terrorism. It seems like someone else's problem,'' she says of the Oklahoma bombing trial. ''The victims of Timothy McVeigh start to really irritate me, and not for no reason. Their bid for significance, their demands for closure, their need to describe the goodness and innocence of the dead, their insistence on filling air time with their compulsion for attention -- they don't seem to understand that they are irrelevant.'' The book is so full of strange, scattershot riffs like that one, written with such misplaced glee, that there's no sense of distance between Wurtzel the writer and Wurtzel the addict. No matter the subject, she clings to a mode of self-congratulatory transgressiveness. Relevance is in the eye of the beholder, but stoned or sober, Wurtzel herself can be so selfish, so nasty and so pampered -- she checks into $450-a-night hotel rooms on a whim, gives drug dealers her publisher's FedEx account number and leans on friends so heavily that they wind up more haggard than Wurtzel herself -- that even readers who've gone through a similar hell may find it difficult to relate Wurtzel's experiences to their own. And since the worst thing that seems to have happened to Wurtzel as a result of her addictions is that she alienated her publishing house and jumped to a new one, what is there to relate to? The most profound loss Wurtzel describes involves someone else -- her drug buddy, the novelist Robert Bingham, who died in 1999. There's nothing to prevent Wurtzel from presenting herself as proxy for Bingham's inner demons, of course, but like much of her book, it's an unpleasant, exploitative alignment. ''Rob and I are both desperate,'' Wurtzel writes. ''Everyone else around him is just decadent.'' But the truth is that while Bingham may have been no more or less desperate than the rest of us, he did apparently overdose on heroin and isn't here to speak for himself. His silence is eloquent. For all her sound and fury, you can't help thinking that Wurtzel never touched the depths of addiction, and found little worth recording in the shallows. Alex Abramovich is a writer in New York. - --- MAP posted-by: Josh