A Hunger for Character in L.A. : HOME MOVIE<i> by Ellen Akins (Simon & Schuster: $</i> 16.95<i> ; 282 pp.) </i>

“Home Movie,” Ellen Akins’ first novel, is hardly your typical adolescent-girl-comes-of-age story, nor is it a standard family tragedy. Instead it is a perplexing, purposefully disjointed story that unwinds much like the strange movie from which the novel’s title derives.

The reader first meets Joey at age 14, pained by the death of her father and abandonment by her mother, who sends occasional postcards to her youngest daughter. “Rumor was her mother was in California,” the novel obliquely begins. “Rumor was a postcard. News was two.” Just as Joey thinks she has determined where her mother is, another card appears “warning that her mother’s whereabouts couldn’t be assumed, she could be anywhere, fulfilling the maternal obligation, omnipresence.”

Forced to live with uninquisitive grandparents for whom “hardship (was) so habitual that it didn’t seem hard, grace the affair of God and saints, elegance the business of MGM, and responsibility an unavoidable burden instead of something noble,” she concludes that “it was better to have no future at all.” Joey takes to spying on the adults in her Midwestern hometown. In so doing, she comes up with a new vision of adulthood: “(Grownups) did what they did simply because they needed something to do.”

Skipping school, she spies on “women cleaning, cooking, opening packages, bending over desks . . . (watching) other women and men at desks, busy with papers, books, telephones. . . .” She is uninspired until she happens upon a middle-aged man living alone in a house in the woods not far from her grandparents. Peeking through the window of the house, she watches David Giffard, its owner, as he, in turn, watches what appears to be a home movie.

It is not long before Giffard discovers Joey, invites her in, teaches her to play the piano and steps in as a mysterious father figure, eliciting Joey’s life story and challenging her with oblique questions while endlessly watching film footage of a young man and a woman, soundlessly and out of sequence. In time, Joey, like Giffard, becomes obsessed with the young actor on Giffard’s home screen and is determined to find the young actor in Los Angeles where, she is told by Giffard, he resides.

There are few likable characters in Akins’ novel. Nor are there predictable ones. Akins creates a haunting cast of L. A. characters who, like David Giffard, seem always to live as though they themselves are in a movie, who appear to fear asking questions of one another and reveal their own feelings and philosophies guardedly. “What someone did and said, where he went and when--these were what (Giffard) meant by tellable aspects, and they didn’t contain the truth of someone.” Just where the “truth of someone” lies is left mysteriously unexplained.

Much of “Home Movie” takes place in Los Angeles, where, interestingly, Joey pursues the handsome man featured in Giffard’s home movie and not her mother (whose last postcard was postmarked there). Joey’s is a strange odyssey amid the seamier side of Hollywood--a town frequented by embittered actors, male strippers, unhappy secretaries, hangers-on and, finally, by Joey’s own mother and her movement from one man to the next.

“Home Movie” is not a pretty story. Its characters are often self-reflective, but they are seldom able to communicate their thoughts to others. As one character observes: “(A nightmare) was the essence of daily life, stripped of the hum and shine and glancing distraction that made it glibly livable.”

Interestingly, Joey, in her role as the observer, somehow stays above the failures and sadness of the people she encounters. Yet Akins’ “Home Movie” is the story of character after character failing to find a home, friends or purpose. “Sometimes it seems like going anywhere is just going around in a circle,” Joey at one point says. “It takes more than a house and a mother and fatherly interest to make a home,” another character bitterly observes. At “Home Movie’s” end, the question remains whether Joey, after her L.A. odyssey, will have come to terms with this fact and moved beyond it.