Not Just Plain Folk : Mary Chapin Carpenter has nailed the post-’60s suburban generation in her songs, but she’s not one to worry about it--she’d rather walk the dog.

After flying from her home in Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, Mary Chapin Carpenter checked in to her hotel, took a late dinner and found herself with a few hours to kill before bed.

She did not head for the clubs. She did not order up a video or pull out a novel.

Instead she walked across the street to a bookstore to buy a volume she already had read, portions of it more than once: “Parting the Curtains: Interviews With Southern Writers,” by Dannye Romine Powell.

The book, in which Eudora Welty and Walker Percy discuss their approaches to writing, is a touchstone for Carpenter. Plainly, reading it gives her comfort, particularly the chapter in which novelist Kaye Gibbons says the solitary act of writing allows her to organize her painful past and fashion her protean present.

Sound familiar? It should.

During the past three years, a growing audience has been listening to Carpenter as she names a past and present so familiar to a post-’60s suburban generation that she is, in a sense, Boomer Poet by Default.

Writing the words to her songs, whether the flippant hit “Shut Up and Kiss Me” or the culturally resonant “Stones in the Road,” is her deliverance. Finding the right words has been Carpenter’s first chore since she was 8, growing up in an educated but uncommunicative family in Princeton, N.J.

“Writing was a place to go,” she says, nursing a decaf cappuccino in her hotel lobby. “It allowed me the only way I knew to express myself. We didn’t talk, as a family. We all led separate lives. I was writing for fulfillment, as I wasn’t getting it any other way.”

She pauses a moment.

“Dad and I are closer now. Mom too. We had to become adults to have a sense of family.

“I don’t blame my parents for this. This is who I am. It’s why I write about distances and silences and the consequences of them.”

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Carpenter--who was in town recently to pick up career Grammys No. 4 and 5 and will return in June for dates at the Greek Theatre and in San Diego--is not your standard-issue folk or country star.

Indeed, the trouble with being Mary Chapin Carpenter, to the extent there is any, is fame: She doesn’t quite get it.

“Hmmmm,” she murmurs, eyebrow cocked. “With fame you’ve got your one-name people. You’ve got your Cher, your Madonna, your Sting.”

Well enough. But you’ve also got your sustained string of hits, which come in tidy bundles of four or more with each album. Indeed, Carpenter’s record sales are huge--her 1992 album “Come On Come On” has sold 2.5 million copies, while last year’s “Stones in the Road” has already passed the 1.5-million mark. She routinely sweeps awards in both the folk and country genres, despite the fact that her at times soul-rending, at times foot-shuffling music defies neat classification. The best index of Carpenter’s presence in the culture, however, is on radio. She is a staple of the country format and holds an increasing presence on pop stations.

In truth, Carpenter is happy about this. She graduated from Brown University in 1981 with a degree in American studies and started out playing $40 folk gigs in Washington--with no particular career, music or otherwise, in sight.

Her preferred word on the subject of being so embraced by the mainstream is grateful . And while she argues against it, she does allow fame’s existence as some disembodied companion or fateful condition that keeps circling her.

“I think of myself as being this musician person who contorts through the obligations of whatever fame is supposed to be,” she says.

“You know, I get nervous pretty easily. And I get exhausted dealing with too many people; that is, I can get peopled out. If you’re not careful, the whole thing can just suck you dry. So I try to keep things low-key. And I try to keep something for myself.”

M yself . No one listening to Carpenter’s lyrics would ever suggest that her use of the M-word carries self-indulgence. If anything, “Stones in the Road,” the title song of her most emotionally compelling album, plows humble, guilty ground. In it, starving children of the world are replaced by homeless souls begging from a plump generation whose main concern is to “crave the corner suite” and “doctor the receipt.”

The “myself” Carpenter refers to is best found knocking about her four-bedroom Victorian house in Washington.

She bought the place only recently after living for years in a three-room apartment in Alexandria, Va.--a tidy dwelling that followed modest rents in Providence, dorms at prep school and, before that, a quiet Princeton upbringing interrupted by two childhood years in Tokyo, where her father, a magazine publishing executive, was transferred.

She confesses to having been “afraid” of her new house with the wraparound porch, thinking it would leave her feeling empty. But things happened the other way around.

“It feels like the first home I’ve ever had, really,” she says. “I go to it and sometimes think, ‘Oh, it’s mine .’ It’s the place of rest and restorative juju. It’s where I work, write, read.”

If it’s home and the place of her solace, however, it is also the center of her isolation. At 37, she lives alone, with her golden retriever, Cal. No husband, no boyfriend, no mate. “That’s just a fact of my life,” she says.

This fact, coupled with her proclivity to name her life’s trials by writing them down, keeps Carpenter in a happy but nervous form of solitary: a rich, fecund aloneness that once in a while goes barren.

“Sometimes being alone is the most enjoyable place to be,” she says. “Other times, it feels forced . . . and I can get so blue that I have a hard time getting out of it.

“But I don’t really know how else to be.”

Like any of the darknesses she plumbs in service to writing songs that turn around and reach for light, intractable doubt is her quarry on “Outside Looking In,” a key introspection from “Stones”: “It’s the hardest kind of need that never knows a reason / Are we such a lonely breed or just born in a lonely season / . . . Just standing on the borderlines, outside looking in.”

The world keeps acting to pull Carpenter in.

She is regularly invited to--and annually attends--the Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head, S.C., which also draws President Clinton. Predictably, she is ironic on the subject of joining the nation’s elite from business, publishing, government and the arts in weighing America’s future.

“The first one I went to was on New Year’s, which is such a hateful moment to me,” she quips. “But I did find it to be very interesting, and it is certainly not the Clinton love-in it is depicted as in the media. But I meant to ask while I was there: ‘How did I get here?’ This invitation just arrives in the mail, and I still don’t know where it actually comes from.”

There are moments, however, in Carpenter’s life when she just needs to get out from everything. Then she will send her own form of surprise invitation to an unsuspecting friend and propose an on-the-spot drive to New York to do nothing more than walk the streets or go to a museum. Failing that, she takes Cal out for a long walk.

This impulse is at its most organized in the autumn, when she rents a beach house in North Carolina. Originally, she took this vacation week solo. But now she invites friends, “the kind of people,” she says, “who don’t need to plan things together all day--everyone can just walk off and do their thing if that’s what they need to do. I know I do, sometimes.”

Carpenter’s discography has evolved with her concerns and life circumstance.

Her first recording, “Hometown Girl,” was released in 1987 to solid reviews but sold poorly and suffered from a perception of being on the heavy side of folk. She then wrote 10 of the songs for the more up-tempo, country-rock “State of the Heart” in 1989, four of those tunes becoming country hits.

Just one year later Carpenter released the album that nudged her into American mainstream consciousness: “Shooting Straight in the Dark,” featuring 10 originals and later bolstered by the video for “Down at the Twist and Shout.” She won a Grammy for best country female vocal and performed for the first time at the Grammy ceremony. The pugnacious “Come On Come On,” released in 1992, became a wildfire: another Grammy for female country vocal (“I Feel Lucky”) and sales to match.

Then came the reflective, luminous “Stones in the Road,” following a year off in the writing, with themes of a generation’s loss of innocence (“Stones”), love’s redemptive power (“This Is Love”) and a mute’s salvaged and haunting dignity, inspired by a newspaper obituary (“John Doe No. 24”). It is the album that comes closest to what Carpenter calls her highest goal, something novelistic: to meld an awareness and concern for the world with personal experience.

Carpenter’s success has earned her “a special place, something unique,” says Bill Ivey, head of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville. “She has melded folk consciousness and values with mainstream, commercial country . . . and yet she’s still the urban folk singer she was in Washington, D.C., six or seven years ago. The question is: Is this a one-shot deal or has she swung open a door?”

Carpenter surely isn’t troubling herself over it. Musical forms or categories don’t really matter to her. Getting the right words out in a fitting context, whatever that may be, does.

If that is the ethic of someone who needs to do her own thing, it is taking her into more rarefied territory yet. Carpenter’s current subject of interest is American artist Joseph Cornell.

Cornell died in 1972, having spent much of his life alone in a house in Queens, N.Y. He peddled wool samples for money but collected junk from flea markets for his art. He built wooden boxes into which he assembled some of the collected fragments, and the boxes became their own “worlds”: shrine-like spaces evoking poetic, sometimes nostalgic themes about child’s play, ballet, film, art, life. He was self-referential, an art world outsider, the quintessential loner.

“His work just speaks to me in a personal way,” Carpenter says. “I wonder about his loneliness. I wonder about his fantasy life. He saved everything. Very few people are true originals, and he was one.”

It could be said that Carpenter is on her way to becoming one herself, though without the eccentricity and appetite for long-term isolation--every other of her songs of love and hope makes that clear. In any event, the subject of Cornell is in for a new form of mining, and Carpenter seems very much up to the job.

She reaches down to tie her shoe, a tan ankle-high construction boot, circa 1970. Yes, she got them as a teen-ager; yes, they are scuffed but remain among her favorite possessions. She runs her hands over dulled brass eyelets, points to the hardy top stitching that in newer boots is replaced by useless, comfy padding.

“These are the real thing,” she says, smiling.

Right. Some things are real, some are not. Deciphering real from fake is the important thing. If, along the way, the going gets rough, Carpenter herself is the first to lace up tight, to turn to the night-stand book of comfort, to remind herself: “It’s important to keep something for yourself.”*

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* Mary Chapin Carpenter plays the Greek Theatre, 2700 N. Vermont Ave., on June 10 at 7:30 p.m. $15.50-$28.50. (213) 480-7575. Also the Summer Pops Bowl, Embarcadero Marina Park South, San Diego, on June 11 at 7 p.m. $23-$30.50. (619) 699-4205.