NEWTON'S LAW: `I KNOW IT SOUNDS LIKE FICTION BUT, TRUST ME, IT DID HAPPEN'

Here's the problem with life as we know it ... there is no way to know it.

Even as you feel your way along and try to keep your jaw from dropping against your chest because of strange things encountered, your capacity for surprise never tops out.

To lift a line from Tom Wolfe, the problem with writing fiction is that it is so often diluted by the oddness of reality. In other words, real life is so strange that it sounds made up, so the made-up stuff of writers doesn't stand a chance.

Don't confuse this with the lingering feeling we get from time to time that our lives and our lives alone are uniquely uninteresting. That's the mood you get when you feel a party is under way and you're not in attendance.

For instance: I telephoned a crony in Memphis this week and he was telling me about the recent activities of a mutual friend who lives in New Orleans. Joe is a New Jersey native who went to Tulane Law School and stayed in the south to work for the U.S. Attorney's office. He is attached to a task force that prosecutes drug cases, which abound in that port city, and spends much of his time trying to depose Haitians who are arrested wearing rags but carrying $60,000 in cash.

Away from this professional tumult, Joe is unmarried and adventurous. It was interest in a particular female that drew him to an art opening last week, that and the rumor that director Oliver Stone, making a film in New Orleans on the JFK assassination, was going to attend.

As it turned out, Stone never showed. Joe, however, ended up being invited to a premiere of "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," which was being hosted at a rented theater by Kevin Costner, the star of Stone's film.

But Joe turned down the invitation ... because he had something better to do.

As I was trying to decide what would be so interesting in my life that I would turn down the chance to hang out with Kevin Costner for an evening, my mind drifted to Wolfe's complaint of fiction writing and recent events that bore him out.

Example: Alice Lungren last week divorced her husband of 21 years. These things happen occasionally. Only Alice is serving a 115-year prison sentence in Ohio for her part in five murders by her husband, who is on death row elsewhere in that state. So maybe absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder.

The comment of Alice's attorney: "She was ecstatic ... (she) wants to get on with her life."

Example: Financially ailing Chrysler Corp. recently found enough money in its bank account to buy Chairman Lee Iacocca's oceanfront penthouse in Florida for more than three times its assessed value. Though the company barely broke even last year, Chrysler paid Iacocca $4.6 million in bonuses and also bought his Michigan home for $905,000. The company said the purchases would "make it possible for Iacocca to continue to devote his full time and attention" to the business.

The new ad campaign shouldn't be hard to predict: "Advantage: Iacocca."

Example: A professional clown in Ohio was sentenced to 10 years in prison last week for trying to hire a hit man to kill his wife. He offered the would-be assassin $400 and a microwave oven.

There must be something about the water in Ohio.

Example: As if Mikhail Gorbachev isn't having enough trouble, the Soviet navy is giving glasnost a bad name now. A Soviet destroyer arrived at Antwerp, Belgium, Tuesday on a goodwill visit. The goodwill might have been in place but the navigational skills went awry; the ship rammed the pier and turned it into rubble.

It gives a new urgency to the phrase, "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!" It now means to get the hell off the dock.

Thus, we lament the plight of poor Mr. Wolfe and his colleagues. Writing good fiction has never been such a chore.