BOOK REVIEW : A Shaky Voice Reveals Horror Below : MANY THINGS HAVE HAPPENED SINCE HE DIED AND HERE ARE THE HIGHLIGHTS. <i> by Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn</i> Doubleday $17.95, 267 pages.

It is a voice with a shattered wing. It skitters and hops, stumbles, rights itself, goes off in the wrong direction, flails, returns and presses uncertainly on.

It is the voice of the abused; the almost but not quite destroyed. Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn’s nameless narrator is a young woman in an Alabama town. She works as a secretary in a law office to support Malone, her husband, in dental school.

She and Malone come from Christian fundamentalist homes. He talks about God and a wife’s duty to obey. He also takes drugs, sleeps around and hits her when he is displeased, or she is slow to give him money. Afterward, he cries, asks forgiveness and does the dishes.

To deal with this jumbled and noxious young man, the narrator has only her own jumble. She believes vociferously in what she was taught: God and a wife’s submission. She vociferously believes, besides, in feminism, pop psychology, Oprah Winfrey and having it all. She burns with resentment and a suppressed refusal to be pushed around, a longing to be happy, no idea how to do it, and a determination to write everything down, sell it, and become rich and famous.

“Many Things Have Happened,” Vaughn’s first novel, takes the form of tapes, notes and an attempted rough draft of the narrator’s intended book. Its subject is the “Many Things” that have occurred in the 15 months or so since her father died.

She marries, gets a job, gets pregnant, fights a lot with Malone--bruises, a broken finger, rape--and goes to Christian counseling sessions with him. Husband and wife each have their separate roles, the counselor tells them. Think of them as food processor and microwave oven. The latter must cook what the former delivers. “Microwave. Food processor,” the narrator tells herself when Malone cleans out their bank account.

Malone dies of a drug overdose. She has the baby and sends him for adoption. When last heard of, she is on the point of looking for an agent and beginning a new book.

The story, of course, is not the story but the voice in which it is told. Her monologue is as disordered as her life, but far more revealing. Her phrases run into each other, double back, contradict themselves in mid-sentence. Her words are masks full of holes; an assertion covers a denial, and we glimpse the denial peeking through.

“Sometimes when I am on the elevator and the other people are ignoring me I think if only you knew who you are with. Someday I will be famous and you will never even know how close you were to me,” the narrator asserts through the mask. Then she retreats back into Christian humility as she refers to her husband:

“Malone sees and helps me to see that Christ came to set us free, not to restrain us. My highest calling is to be a helpmeet for him, to obey him, to submit my desires to his, since only in losing my life shall I find it. Someday Malone will be very rich.”

That last phrase is an eye seeking an eyehole. A moment later it glares furiously through:

“If I had to kill myself or somebody else it would not be bloody. You can stick a nail in somebody’s ear when they’re asleep and they won’t be able to figure out what did it if you pull it back out.” An afterthought: “If you do the nail you should probably give them sleeping pills too because if you accidentally woke them up how would you explain.”

The darting mind beats against its confinements. Sometimes it seems demented. More often, it zig-zags around the scars of abuse. The narrator remembers her father with love but tells us next to nothing about him. She mentions an uncle and something he did to her which she will not reveal.

There are moments of horror, of pain and of comedy. The lawyer she has an unconfessed crush on--another peering concealment--likes Virginia Woolf. She reads a biography, including the suicide note to Leonard in which Woolf ends: “I cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

“How could she be a famous writer if she didn’t know grammar? My book will have all the apostrophes it needs. Whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it heartily as unto the Lord,” the narrator sniffs. And crumples: “Think about not thinking two people could have been happier than you have been. I have been wondering if other people were as miserable as me.”

The pain is revealed, of course, by the detours, the diversions, the concealments. The comedy may be painful as well, but it is a sign of buoyancy and, beyond that, of life.

Vaughn’s book is more of a dramatic monologue than a novel. It goes on too long for what it has to say. Its formlessness is its necessary form, of course--reflecting a troubled mind--but it is also an inevitable weakness. It does not quite end, it peters out. And yet in its main purpose, it is remarkably successful. The voice is unmistakable though outgunned; it will not succumb, though it will probably be silenced.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” by Roald Dahl.