COURTNEY LOVE: QUEEN OF NOISE

COURTNEY LOVE: QUEEN OF NOISE Melissa Rossi (Pocket Books, $5.99) Reluctant biographer Rossi (she prefers writing ''stupid little novels,'' and it shows) does a respectable job of clambering into the tousled blond head of Courtney Love. Although the Kurt material is quite predictable, there's plenty of seamy secondhand detail about Love's pre-Cobain adventures: the weird juxtaposition of trust fund and foster homes, the strip clubs, the drug forays in now-notorious Pacific Northwest neighborhoods. Though this biography isn't authorized, Rossi has actually hung out with grunge's most famous widow, so the book's high school-hallway-chitchat mode is pretty informative. One caveat: The singer's exhibitionistic tendencies are simplistically traced to insecurity about a coarse physical appearance (she's dubbed, alternately, a ''dumpling-bodied yapper'' and a ''big doughy sack of intensity''). Love partisans will object, and indeed, there's got to be a better explanation for that mouth she's got on her. B -- Alexandra Jacobs

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