The Magician’s Girl by Doris Grumbach (Macmillan: $16.95; 224 pp.)

Though the idea of a novel about a cohort of college classmates beckons alluringly to American writers, few manage to surmount the built-in hazards as gracefully as Doris Grumbach has done here. Wisely, she limits her group to three uncommon women, not one of whom is either a type or a cliche. Moreover, she concentrates upon each character at a different stage of life, so we’re spared the familiar redundancies of undergraduate tribulations and sophomore romance. Grumbach gives us only the essentials of these interconnected lives; nothing extraneous or irrelevant to her highly particular narrative. “There is, at the core of a life history, an inscrutable enigma no biographer, friend or novelist can solve.” These fundamental riddles linger to lift this thoughtful novel out of the usual mold, leaving the reader pondering their ambiguities; concerned with the characters long after the last page. “The Magician’s Girl” is not the slick, glossy package we’ve come to expect from such novels, but slightly ragged and tantalizingly open-ended, like life itself.

The first member of the trio we encounter is Minna Grant, as an overprotected 6-year-old, living comfortably in mid-town Manhattan in the 1930s. Even then, Minna is a private and independent spirit, outwardly conforming to her parents’ constraints while quietly developing a will of steel. As a teen-ager, she acquires a passion for swimming, for pushing herself to the limits of endurance, fascinated by the recent triumph of Gertrude Ederle. Just as suddenly, she becomes disenchanted, perhaps at the sad spectacle of her heroine, “strapping, muscular, flat-footed, thick-hipped,” lending her name and endorsement to the manufacturers of Flit, a popular insect repellent even then the butt of jokes. Thereafter, Minna swims only to test herself, plunging into the ocean as if it were her enemy, “the sum total of her fears, the cumulative phobia that canceled out the fading pleasure of her youth and made itself part of the ferocious and threatening world around her.” A crucial lesson has been learned, and by the time she enters Barnard College, life has caught up with her, temporarily subduing her rebellious spirit. She marries a dear, dull man and slips out of the novel’s foreground.

Maud Mary Noon immediately usurps the empty place, holding it for much of the book. Though we also see her first as a child of 5, Maud’s background contrasts sharply with Minna’s. Her father is a career Army man, away so much that Maud is hardly aware of his presence. Her older brother Spencer fills that gap, buffering the homely, myopic, overweight girl from the indifference of their mother, a hard-working woman so utterly obsessed with physical perfection that the annual Atlantic City Miss America pageant becomes the focal point of her life; the contestants more her daughters than Maud could ever be. Strong, handsome, athletic and kind, Spencer contracts polio, the scourge of the era, and eventually succumbs to pneumonia. With his death, Maud is cast adrift, thrown on the mercy of the world. Hopelessly lacking in beauty herself, she is pathetically vulnerable to good looks in others. An unlikely candidate for romance, her acute, quirky intelligence nevertheless fascinates an extraordinarily attractive Columbia student, who marries her because her homeliness matches an obscure need in his personality. For a short time, their neuroses seem to mesh, but after fathering twin sons, Luther abandons Maud, leaving her with the little boys, a severely damaged self-image and her gift for poetry, not quite powerful enough to counteract her despair.

Liz Becker grows up in Greenwich Village, the child of eccentric and symbiotic political radicals. When her parents lose their teaching jobs, they retrench not only financially but emotionally. “Affection, like oxygen in a sickroom, was meted out among the Beckers in very small doses. What there was of it, to Liz’s mind, was reserved to her parents for each other.” For Liz, as for Maud, the vacuum is filled by a surrogate--in this case, her grandmother, a vital and loving connection abruptly severed by a bizarrely horrible street accident. Though we will glimpse Liz from time to time in relation to Maud and Minna; hear about her increasingly successful career as a photographer, Maud and Minna continue to dominate the novel. One of the book’s many ironies is that while Liz not only becomes the actual survivor but the woman whose life might once have been considered unconventional, she seems the least vibrant and memorable of the three.

Maud, whose life was short and tragic, lives on in our minds; Minna, who seemed so placid for so long, becomes a rebel in late middle-age, achieving the personal and professional satisfactions she’d missed in the decades before. The fact that no one in this book is ever quite synchronized in time or place gives “The Magician’s Girl” a special tension; an asymmetry far more original and provocative than the contrived balance a less daring writer would offer.