YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS by Joyce Carol Oates<i> (Abrahams/Dutton: $19.95; 429 pp.) </i>

Joyce Carol Oates opens this novel with a brutally honest account of a 15-year-old girl waiting to die after swallowing 47 aspirin. This prologue sets the tone for a portrayal, as disturbing as it is intimate, of a lower-middle-class family in the ‘50s. Oates plays against all that connotes the stereotypical ‘50s family (“Leave It to Beaver,” Chevies, Sunbeam bread) and uncovers the dark secrets inherent in all families--incest, adolescent sexual desire, isolation and suicide.

In the Stevick family, father Lyle is a family man, resigned to his life as a used-furniture store owner. He and wife Hannah have four children: Geraldine, who gets pregnant and must marry; Warren, who fights in Korea; promiscuous Lizzie, who shames her parents by becoming a nightclub singer; and Enid, the youngest, the one with the aspirin.

Enid is quiet, intelligent and always well-behaved. But privately she struggles with a darker self, her alter ego, whom she calls “Angel-Face.” This darker self tempts her to steal trinkets from stores, to enjoy men’s glances on the street.

When Enid is 14, her Uncle Felix, who is twice her age, seduces her. Felix “the Cat” is a retired middleweight boxing champion. Envied and scorned by Lyle, his half-brother, Felix is dark, brooding and glamorous. He gambles, womanizes and lives dangerously. Enid falls in love with him, and when he ignores her, she writes him a note saying, “Felix I want to die. I love you so much.” When he still doesn’t respond, she becomes obsessed with the idea of committing suicide. She longs for death to the point where commonplace things evoke a death call. She feels it in the pull of the undertow at Lake Shoal and sees it in the complex pattern of her bedroom wallpaper.

Felix, taken by her willingness to die for him, comes back to her, and they carry on a passionate, destructive love affair. These are four years of erotic, violent scenes in the back seats of cars and cheap hotel rooms on the outskirts of town. In these disturbing love scenes, Oates traverses the territory of obsessive desire with agility and insight reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. She brings us in uncomfortably close. We feel the breath of these characters.

The metaphor of boxing is used continuously throughout Enid and Felix’s love affair. Their relationship begins when Felix playfully teaches Enid how to box at a family barbecue. The game develops from horseplay into something rougher, more sexual. Later in the novel, Felix describes his relationship to Enid: “A blood bond as if between two men who’d fought each other to a draw. Or say one of them beat the other decisively but the losing fighter fought a courageous fight and pushed himself beyond the limit--the winner was forever in his debt.”

In this novel, romantic love is a boxing match. Oates previously wrote a nonfiction, reportorial book called “On Boxing.” She describes boxing as two people “locked desperately together in their futile match--circling, ‘dancing,’ jabbing, slapping, clinching . . . .” Enid and Felix are caught in an erotic love-hate bond played out much as in Oates’ journalistic portrayal.

Beyond Enid and Felix, the members of this family circle each other endlessly and rarely touch. Oates creates the disjunct nature of family by changing point of view from character to character. Through their interior monologues, we realize how alienated these individuals are from one another. They don’t get close. They live by appearances.

Most everyone treats Enid’s suicide attempt as if it were an accident. No one questions Felix’s extravagant presents to her or dares to consider an incestuous relationship.

But whenever these characters stop sparring with each other and make human contact, the story comes alive and takes on a universal dimension. Witness Lyle Stevick shyly asking his wife to make love to him after 18 years of abstinence. They are alone. The children have grown and gone. On a small bed in their newly built bomb shelter, awkward with each other as if it were their first time, they remember love.

Oates’ prose is poetic and contemplative. She constructs her sentences by layering detail upon detail, a quiet tiptoe which often builds to an overwhelming revelation. But sometimes this style doesn’t work. The sentences grow long and stringy; the accretive effect of the details and images negates the power of her inventiveness.

Oates has played with many of these same themes in earlier works. “Solstice” explored obsessive love between two women. The stories in “Raven’s Wing” displayed Oates’ concern for the violence, passion hidden beneath the surfaces of all lives. Her 19th-Century novel “Mysteries of Winterthurn” offered dark, bizarre events with a heightened sense of violence--bloody murders, poisonings and rape.

But “You Must Remember This” is a particularly bold effort. Weaving historical events such as the Korean War, the McCarthy hearings and the Rosenberg trials with the psychological dynamics of the Stevick family, Oates captures the complex nature of family during a perplexing time in American history. In accepting the 1970 National Book Award for “Them,” Oates said, “It is the legendary quality of the past we are most interested in, the immediate past, mysterious and profound, that feeds into the future. It’s writers who create history.” Oates has most certainly created a bit of history here.