TALES OF 'WHITE RABBIT'\Making some unusual choices.

Byline: Juli Michaud Special to the Daily News

Kate Phillips, author of the best-selling "White Rabbit," seemed more interested in interviewing the interviewer than in promoting her very well-received first novel. Where did I live? Where was I from? How long had I lived in California?

For Phillips, California is more than a state of mind.

A native of the state, Phillips worked at the Claremont Courier before attending Harvard graduate school, where she is writing her dissertation on Helen Hunt Jackson, the writer responsible for Hemet's longest-running outdoor play, "Ramona."

Phillips wrote articles and edited the arts and entertainment section at the Courier, while beginning her novel about Ruth - a most interesting 88-year-old Southern California woman - and her last day on Earth.

Eventually, Phillips quit the paper to concentrate full time on the book. When it was finished, she put it aside and taught English for a while in China while considering a career as a free-lance travel writer.

Then came the Tiananmen Square crackdown, in which students were shot while protesting, and she began to seriously question her original goals. Around the same time, she happened across a newspaper article about how difficult it will be in the future for people who are growing older in the West, which contrasted sharply with the extended family systems she saw in China.

But Phillips also wanted to write about California. Even though she lives back east, she sees herself as quite definitely a California writer. Heavily influenced by the dystopian California experience represented in such classic literature as Nathanial West's "Day of the Locust," Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" and Joan Didion's work, Phillips definitely wants to be considered of that tradition.

"Dreams are so limitless and reality is so limited," she said. "So many times, when I hear poets reading bucolic nature poems, and writers celebrating the land and their gardens, they always strike me as nostalgic ... because my experience is the suburban L.A. sprawl, where I didn't go into nature that much. I think the development in California always has had this effect on writers. Something about the fast development and sort of isolated people, (results in) lonely characters in a lot of the books."

And Ruth, the main character in "White Rabbit," is a very lonely character as well as comical. Living in a Laguna Beach condominium with her second husband, Henry, who longs for even the remote possibility of fooling around with the wife who has banished him from the bedroom as a condition of marriage, Ruth rules the roost with the strictest of rituals.

Time is to be controlled and filled up at all costs. Even her morning shredded wheat is regulated.

Phillips admits that an elderly main character initially was a barrier to publication (gee, we like your writing but don't you have anything else?), but it now has become a point of interest. HBO has optioned the book for a TV movie. The author wistfully thinks about how great a role it would have been for the late Jessica Tandy.

Interviewers and radio show callers across the country want to know why she wrote about an 88-year-old woman. She views this as another form of ageism. "Ruth is a person. Nobody asks John Grisham why he writes about lawyers," she said matter-of-factly.

Phillips does want to expose people to older characters, but her broader goal was to write about "an ordinary person who has something extraordinary about them. That's what I sort of like in fiction myself. A story about an ordinary person ... and how inside in the past she was quite full of wonder and yearning and love, and it got shut down."

Her own grandmother also lived in Laguna Beach. Some habits were based on the grandmother, but not her life. She did save burned-out light bulbs, however, and labeled them with the day of expiration, a habit the author gave to Ruth. Her stepgrandfather also had "strategic deafness" as does Ruth's husband, Henry:

"I remember one time at Thanksgiving, supposedly he couldn't hear anything, and then one of my parents' friends told this raunchy joke and he (the step-grandfather) burst into hysterics (laughing). We thought he was deaf."

"White Rabbit's" reviews have been quite positive, unusual for first novels. Of her recent glowing write-up in The New York Times she said, "Friends tell me it's unbelievable that I got a good review."

However, she is quick to credit her good reviews to luck and believes that "it can go either way because sometimes good books get bad reviews."

She has no plans to enter the academic job market after completing her doctorate but wants to continue writing fiction. There is not much time for that at present, however, but she did say the next book is about three women in their 20s. It will be an exploration of how little things can change the entire course of a person's life - something Phillips knows about from personal experience.

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Photo "White Rabbit" author Kate Phillips' goal was to write about "an ordinary person who has something extraordinary about them. That's what I sort of like in fiction myself. A story about an ordinary person." Juli Michaud/Special to the Daily News