Tassie Keltjin, the observant protagonist of Lorrie Moore's comic, moving and ultimately harrowing new novel, is -- like most of us -- easily distracted and emotionally unsettled. She's a Midwestern college student with a Lutheran father and Jewish mother who grew up on a farm that's really a ``kitchen garden that had gotten slightly out of hand.'' She's romantically inexperienced and frets about her youthful passivity: ``It had started to worry me that if I wasn't careful my meekness could become a habit, a tic, something hardwired.