All Things Reconsidered  Date: June 9, 1996, Late Edition -
Final Byline: By Molly Haskell  By Barbara Grizzuti Harrison.
397 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $24.95.  Imagine a
modern Penelope weaving a tapestry of words each day, unraveling
it at night and reweaving it again the following day. We could
react in one of two ways: churlishly, like the suitors, saying
the game's up, you're repeating yourself; or, more generously
(and ultimately more stimulating to our own pleasure and
imagination), by seeing what wondrous gifts are being laid
before us, perceiving the variations between one day's
composition and the next -- how shapes and tonalities are
amended in the retelling, how leading characters take on a
mythic quality as they turn up at different removes, and how,
with each day's work, the artist goes further in elaboration or
insight.   This pattern of recurrence and repetition, this sense
of memory as a Heraclitean river in which each step is both
familiar and new, is the guiding principle for Ba