BOOK REVIEW : SPRINGS OF LIVING WATER<i> by Karen Lawrence</i> VILLARD BOOKS $17.95 : ‘Springs’ Flow From Depiction of the Troubled Waters of Childhood

Miranda (Min) McCune lives in Southern California, has a good career as a photographer and has just wangled an advance from her publisher to travel in North and South America and Europe to take pictures of hot springs and the people who bathe in them. Externally, her life looks fine. She’s in her middle 30s, lives in Malibu and has a faithful boyfriend, Peter, who wants to settle down and get serious. If some of the facts in this paragraph already seem too good to be true, Min herself shares this disbelief: The life she has constructed has no roots in the mucky past she’s grown up in. “ ‘Creating your own reality,’ they called this in California. Here they believed that everyone possessed this lordly, ingenious power. You just had to snap out of that other way of thinking and it would come naturally, like buoyancy in salt water.”

But on the eve of her hot-springs assignment, Min is jerked rudely back into the past by a letter from her little sister, who tells her that their father, back in the family house in Wyandotte, Ontario, Canada, is very sick. Rina, who has stayed home while Min fled, could use some help.

What this story is really about is the fear or the inability to step on out into life when your childhood has been so bad that all experience tells you that “life,” as we know it, just isn’t worth the time or trouble.

Min’s memories of her past are gloomy: “There was never enough room to get away from the others in her family. They were stranded together on a raft of misery. The recollection of all that pointless turbulence lived at her core and still did its work, chewing at her steadily. Her images of family were being cornered, hounded, deeply unhappy.” And later, Min remembers, “punishment of all kinds was a grand scene in those days, in these houses . . . some child was always getting walloped, whacked, slapped, spanked, swatted, straightened out or licked. The streets echoed with promises. I’ll lick you good. I’ll really give you something to cry about. I’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.”

Min was raised by a furious and frightening mother who died of cancer before her capacity for instilling terror into her children could abate in the natural way. Min’s father has worked at a meaningless job, could have been an inventor, and was left dazed and helpless by his wife’s death. Rina, the baby sister, only 8 when the death occurred, was left as nothing more than a human ball of grief, a set of emotional demands that her older sister could never satisfy.

Sorrow! Grief! Exasperation! Resentment! A strong wish to never never grow up to be like your parents, coupled with the sour knowledge that you can’t help it, you’re carrying their genetic imprint, your fate is sealed. (I know nothing at all about this sort of story, but some readers may be able to identify with this situation.)

But what about the other side, those “springs of living waters?” Why does Min feel that she has to search them out, photograph them?

During another chapter in her childhood, Min accompanied her fierce mother to a California hot spring to be cured of cancer by all the alternative ways: guided imagery, wheat-grass juice, immersion in healing springs. Min’s first sense of what love might be has occurred in a spring with a young boy, dying of leukemia.

These scenes are wonderful and I wish there had been more of them: How could a hard-case fiend like Min’s mother ever cast her lot for even a few weeks with an outfit like the Ananda Institute? How did such transcendent hope/courage/foolishness ever find its way into her mean little body? Because a subtext in this story is that Min’s mother lived her life at about 60% misery versus 40% hope, and that Min herself has just barely managed to reverse these statistics. How did that happen and why?

When Min returns home to look at her past, she finds out more than she wants to know. Her father, in a moment of bitter communication, says, “living your own life--my God, nobody we knew ever lived their own life.” But her sister, Rina, who accompanies her to Europe, treasures whatever pleasure comes to her, chewing down pastries, saying, “This is as good as it gets. . . . “

“Springs of Living Water” has some contrived passages, but the work is good. And the question it addresses--how do you get over a terrible childhood, stop sulking and quivering about all the sadness you’ve encountered?--may possibly be the most important personal question of our time.

Next: “Dialogo” by Primo Levi and Tullio Regge (Princeton University Press).