BOOK REVIEW : Fine Break in Lady-Manners : SHE DROVE WITHOUT STOPPING <i> by Jaimy Gordon</i> Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill $18.95, 390 pages

Long, ambitious, sad, macabre, “She Drove Without Stopping” asks a hundred unanswerable questions. The first and most important is: Why in the world is it that some parents hate their children? The second, and at least as important: How can the child heal himself or herself, find a place in the world and stop being so dopily brokenhearted about it?

The author does some amazing things with this by now familiar tale. And it’s only in the reading of this novel that you see there are things here that writers haven’t yet spoken of--so well-mannered have they been, even in the middle of their literary rage. Most women writers, for instance, have evened the score, or tried to, with mothers who have withheld love. There have been a rash of those novels lately. An abandoned mother and daughter may blame each other for years, months, decades, for transgressions perceived by each, but lay aside--as part of a ladies’ agreement--any reproach toward the husband and father who has left them both. In the same way, most of these orphan-novels rail at mothers or husbands, while the fathers get off scot-free. It’s just not good lady-manners to attack the dad, no matter how lily-livered he may be. This convention has extended from real life into literature--until this snappy little novel.

Jane Turner, eldest of three daughters, figures out by the time she’s 7 or 8 that her father can’t stand her. It must be her fault; she must be doing something wrong. True, her father has his hand in her underwear all the time, but he’s not a molester, he’s just, well, strange. Much more to the point, he doesn’t like to look at her, or talk to her. But no, he’s not a child beater either, although he does hit her every so often for her own good.

Philip Turner, successful attorney, probably shouldn’t have been tied down with a wife and three children at all. He loves his tennis whites, and he’s stolen from his kids’ bank accounts to buy himself a green MG. (One of those wonderful ones from the ‘50s or ‘60s.) His wife, Sascha, keeps herself together by weekly visits to her friendly shrink, a better husband to her than her husband.

As narrative, all this still seems fairly standard. But Jaimy Gordon has put her finger on the links between love, sexuality and money. Philip Turner is a notorious skinflint. As his daughters grow up, he begrudges them every penny (because, it turns out, he’s been squandering money on secretaries). He keeps money from his daughter, Jane, and part of the subplot here is her tenacious effort to get back the money he stole from her long ago.

Jane runs away from college, into a life “where anything can happen to her.” She dives down, down, through social classes. The worst things do happen to her. She loses everything, and loses everything again. Behind all this is the unstated question: Where are her parents? Who will be her protectors? By this time, her mother has been abandoned and will be living on her own earnings as a potter, since to divorce an attorney is to face a future of penury. Jane’s mother has been made a zombie, and Jane searches out the shrink who brainwashed her all these years to tell him so.

But Jane is hardly visible. She’s too weird. She’s the kind who gets raped (and then yelled at for being raped). And even if she killed her father who hates her, he’d still leave this world hating her. So what would be the point? The universe saves Jane, because her father can’t be bothered. She finds other fathers, brave and kind. She finds lovers, adventures, sexuality, fun.

This is a fine novel. If a boy had written it, the narrative power would be feted and acclaimed. I suspect men--and women too--may shudder at this one and return a few five-dollar bills to their own kids’ piggy bank.

Next: Lee Dembart reviews “Turning the World Inside Out: And 174 Other Simple Physics Demonstrations” by Robert Ehrlich.