By James DiGiovanna Dancing Queen: A Lusty Look at the American Dream, by Lisa Carver (Henry Holt and Company). Paper, $12 WITH DANCING QUEEN, Lisa Carver puts the "grrr" back in "girl". This sex-obsessed book about whatever happens to be on the author's mind when she gets near a typewriter is an uneven but often amusing look at America from a wannabe white-trash perspective. Essentially, as our horny author says, "Dancing Queen is about liking stuff!" That is, it's not the negative, Velvet Underground, teen-angst, alternapop, Kurt Cobain version of our fine country, but rather one wherein everything reeks of glorious sexuality. Carver is turned on by everyone from Anna Nicole Smith to Lawrence Welk, whose cadre of polyester covered, blue-eye-shadowed, dancing clone-girls make Lisa's seat wet. This pudendum-eye-view of the world wears a little thin by the time Carver mentions her hard-on for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the anti-Semitic Russian strongman who claims to have eaten his wife's stillborn baby. However, she does manage to movingly convey the erotic quality of a trip to a sadistic hairdresser in addition to finding the hidden depth in Bee Gees lyrics. So I guess I'm willing to forgive her over-indulgences. In sum, if you secretly find Fabio unironically attractive, think that "Pop Tarts going into the toaster slot look lascivious," and you'd love to read creatively enhanced synopses of Harlequin's finest literary output, I can recommend no better book than Dancing Queen.

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