No matter how many of them inundate the market, squirmy puberty stories about bulbous pimples and chronic insecurity still draw me in. Is it because I like to snicker at the scarring humiliations others have experienced? Well, yes, but also because even though puberty is puberty and it has been the angst-ridden focus of many a novel, everybody still seems to come up with a different story to tell. As does Sia Figiel, whose coming-of-age novel takes place in the small Samoan village of Malaefou in the early 1970s.

The story focuses on three girls: Alofa, the 12-year-old narrator, and her two best friends, loudmouth Moa with a "beer-bottle voice," and Lili, the misunderstood village whore. While reporting on the daily activities of the three girls, who share everything from showers to relatives to a deep lust for John Travolta -- along with discoveries of pornos and periods -- the author subtly weaves in background information on Samoan culture in this era. Samoan dialect is often used in poems, folk tales, and in conversations between characters, but it is surrounded with enough insinuation to avoid confusion. If you remember that "aiga" means "family" and "Palagi" means "American," you should be okay.

The narrator's voice is smart and humorous, and she uses statements such as, "Bats lived in her armpits and the crotch of her panties," to describe her nemesis. Although I'm not quite sure exactly what that means, this original use of language certainly keeps the text lively and makes Figiel's first novel a worthwhile read. JILL WASBERG

ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA
by Richard Rorty
(Harvard University Press) $12.95

If nationalist rhetoric is the last refuge of a scoundrel, it remains nonetheless one of the most effective mobilizing tools of international recidivist politics. Forces of evil notoriously employ nationalism as cover: racism, ethnic hatred, greed, rape, fascism, tax relief, and sadism of many varieties have sought justification and public love by donning nationalist garb.

So why does philosophy's self-styled pragmatist Richard Rorty advocate national pride to cure left-wing cynicism and indolence? These days the American right wing controls the ethnocentric agenda. Pat Buchanan has real power, while left-wing intellectuals diddle away their energies on the scholasticism of Foucault and Derrida. Such decadence on the Left allows the Right to run rampant. Though the academy, Rorty admits, has trained a generation of undergraduates to be less racist, sexist, and homophobic, whatever cultural gains the Left has won will be lost without control over law and money.

1960s-style revolution having failed, Rorty wants the Left to renew earlier efforts at piecemeal reform of economic issues. So far, not bad, but Rorty's big question -- how to motivate the Left -- conjures an unsettling answer. Rorty wants intellectuals to stop doing theory and start being patriotic. The Left can ease its collective (un)consciences in its bid for power by believing that it is fighting the good fight for the good ol' USA. To that end, Rorty outlines a self-congratulatory, nationalist history (starring John Dewey, Walt Whitman, Abe Lincoln, and others). Hard to swallow? It probably is for Rorty, too. He has made his career in philosophy by denying the plausibility of objectivity, arguing that truth depends on what is effective, rather than vice versa. He is trying to write an effective history, but its truth depends on whether his audience buys it. Rorty's fundamental insight -- that political action requires a collective image to unify the troops -- is well-taken, but a nationalist myth has probably played itself out for the thinking American Left. GREGG MILLER

LOST AND FOUND

COME TO ME
by Amy Bloom
(Harper Perennial reprint) $12

In Amy Bloom's story collection Come to Me, a few stories are linked through common characters, and all are linked thematically. Each story serves to further a premise: Even sincere love and straight sex can lead to socially unacceptable or unspeakable possibilities.

The first story in the collection is perhaps the most technically complex, encompassing a wide span of time and addressing the issue of monogamy on an intergenerational level. In this story, "Love Is Not a Pie," a daughter's dawning awareness of her father's acceptance of her mother's lover leads the daughter through her own struggles with a marriage proposal. Other stories further an examination of sexual entanglements: One displays a desperate love developing between a single mother and her lonely, aging obstetrician, while a second tells of a recently widowed woman's one-night stand with her own 19-year-old stepson. We meet couples who contemplate affairs, and adolescent girls who soothe middle-school pain by accepting the advances of older men.

Bloom creates a vision of a world guided primarily by sexual longing. It makes sense that the author is a psychotherapist who, according to the jacket, "divides her time between writing and her practice" -- exactly half that time listening to patients, I imagine, and the other half arranging their tormented lives into well-shaped short stories. Even the stories told in first person have a sense of voyeurism, observation, and analysis. And as with any good therapist, Amy Bloom approaches all of the material with understanding for its intricacy, offering a detached empathy without censorial judgment. The strength of this work is in its credibility, and its even-handed delivery of the emotionally charged dynamics behind what often appears to be failed love and misguided sex. MONICA DRAKE