Have Judith Viorst's Imperfect Control or Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger delivered to your door! Just click on the book jacket to order.

Here are some "self-help" books that go beyond making easy promises

by Tracy Jones

It's early in the women's figure skating long program, and Nicole Bobek, whose undignified falls and stumbles during the short program were captured from every conceivable angle by intrepid photographers, falls again. Stumbles again. At the end of the piece, she simply shrugs. The commentator, the normally chirpy Scott Hamilton, says something uncharacteristically fatalistic. "When you're in a slump, you're in a slump," he says. "There is simply no way to will yourself out of it. You just have to ride it out."

That's something Americans aren't used to hearing. Ever since the first colonists pulled themselves up by the straps on their buckled boots, we've become a nation accustomed to hearing that hard work pays. Always. And pays quickly. That's why self-help shelves and magazines (including, now, periodicals for men) are filled with promises of Ten Easy Steps To... and Four Weeks Until..., until whatever problem you have is solved. We pretend that our emotions and our inner selves are guided by principles as fundamental as those of chemistry, that it is just a matter of applying them to see the formula work.

Judith Viorst doesn't have five or 10 easy anything to offer in her latest book of popular psychology. Imperfect Control: Our Lifelong Struggles with Power and Surrender (Simon & Schuster) is an accomplished follow-up to her earlier, best-selling Necessary Losses. As in that earlier work, Viorst, a popular contributor to Redbook and other magazines, draws on her training in psychoanalysis for many of her theories about relationships. She is a much too accomplished writer, though, to allow those theories to put a distance between her and her readers. Instead, Imperfect Control is rich with case histories from life and literature, all serving to illustrate her point: Whether we are industrious plodders or shiftless rogues, our lives are pushed and pulled by forces we may never consider.

Viorst begins her study of power and control with infancy— the baby's heady rush of "I Am"— and ends with issues surrounding death, including whether we have a right to choose death when our lives become unbearable to us. In between, she talks about teen vs. parent, spouse vs. spouse, and underling vs. boss. It's a lot of territory for one medium-sized book to cover, but Viorst handles it by making the reader her collaborator. Her well-chosen and well-executed anecdotes provide the framework for readers to see how these issues work in their own lives.

As Viorst makes clear, we decide early, through some undetermined mix of genetic predisposition and family environment, whether we think things happen to us or we happen to things. But, as Viorst points out, despite our national admiration for the type who sticks it out despite the odds, sometimes accepting our helplessness against outside forces is the smartest, most positive thing we can do. When we do this, we avoid what Viorst calls "the pathology of persistence," that dogged determination that makes us stay with bad jobs, bad marriages, bad fits in general. She also reveals another truth usually left out of debates about power—that the person who seemingly has the upper hand in a situation often doesn't. Think of an elderly, impoverished father who can draw his yuppie children to his bedside with one misfiring blip on a piece of medical machinery.

Viorst's book, suffused with humor and guided by her intelligent morality, is meant to appeal to a broad audience, one beyond the bounds of more specialized psychological tomes. If Viorst's free-form musings on power leave you want-ing more of a "how-to" sort of book (self-help is a hard habit to break), you could do no worse than Harriet Lerner's reissued classic The Dance of Anger (Perennial). Like Viorst, Lerner admits the impossibility of shaping the world according to one's own plans, but she does believe that our own reactions to the world's shape are perfectly under our control.

Still one of the biggest sellers in the self-help category, The Dance of Anger explains how to address issues of power in a relationship while still trying to keep the relationship alive. But Lerner does not make false promises. As she makes clear, those who follow her rules don't always get what they want. The woman who refuses to allow her husband to belittle her doesn't necessarily wind up with a contrite, enlightened husband. Very often, instead, he ends up with another wife. But, as these authors would remind us, life is not a Bewitched-like matter of twitching one's nose and having everything come out right. Forcing us to acknowledge what we can fix— and what is simply beyond us— is the first step toward a change more lasting than the quick patch-up jobs offered by the many less honest authors out there.