NOTE FOUND IN A BOTTLE: MY LIFE AS A DRINKER

NOTE FOUND IN A BOTTLE: MY LIFE AS A DRINKER Susan Cheever (Simon & Schuster, $23) Drinking gets discussed surprisingly little in this memoir. It's always there, sure -- ''Sometimes I drank some wine during the day''; ''Robert mixed martinis in the parlor''; ''At my birthday dinner we drank a few bottles of champagne'' -- but it's there on the page the same way traffic noises are there in a city: It's part of the scenery. Like most alcoholics, Cheever never thought she had a problem because she was always able to function normally -- she worked, wrote books, married, had children. Her story is a fascinating one, and she makes her points in understated, almost diffident prose, until the final chapter's AA-esque meditation on God. B+

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