Books: Running Deep

MIDSTREAM

by Le Anne Schreiber

Viking; 309 pages; $18.95

By the time she was 33, Le Anne Schreiber had a resume to light up the Zeitgeist. With a marriage behind her, a master's degree from Stanford and a graduate fellowship at Harvard, she came to New York City as a writer for TIME. Her coverage of the 1976 Olympics led to a job as editor in chief of Billie Jean King's short-lived magazine womenSports. Within eight months of joining the New York Times, Schreiber became the first woman to run its sports department.

And the first woman to quit. "I rode a rocket of unprecedented opportunity," she writes. But two years of prodding a herd of jock journalists led to the discovery that "there was nothing I wanted to do less than spend 80 hours a week administering a staff of 59 men and one woman in producing three editions a day."

Fair enough. Being a point person in the workplace revolution carries a high risk of getting shot. Schreiber retreated to a deputy editorship at the Times Sunday Book Review, a backwater, it turned out, that was not quite the backwater she had in mind. In 1985, single and approaching the middling age of 40, she left Manhattan for the eddying pace of a trout stream in upstate New York. The scene was set for a life of house renovation, fishing, reading and writing. Instead, Schreiber was jerked back to old realities by the news that her mother was dying of cancer.

Writing in the journal form, Schreiber balances her new life against her mother's death. She achieves this satisfying parity with emotional integrity and literary tact that suggest a depth of experience the author only hints at. Wisely. The results are clear and lasting observations rather than self- justifying trendy confessions.

Descriptions of trout fishing, house repair, medical treatment and mistreatment lead to deeper connections. The stream that rushes behind Schreiber's house and the life that dwindles from her mother's body contain mysteries that must be skillfully lured to the surface. Among the enigmas is the nature of mother-daughter relationships. The moving paradox here is that Schreiber is never more of a daughter than when she must mother her dying parent.

Midstream may remind a few of Ludwig Lewisohn's Mid-Channel. Sixty years ago, this journalist also tired of Manhattan's temptations and asked, "How do you live from within outward? From what ultimate satisfactions do you derive your poise, your power, your courage in the face of this apparently empty universe, of age, of death?" Schreiber offers some honest answers.