BOOK REVIEW : First-Timer’s Novel Has Two Tales in One : JOY, <i> by Marsha Hunt</i> . Dutton, $19.95, 384 pages

We are told that the author of “Joy” is “the mother of Mick Jagger’s first child.” (That doesn’t seem, at first glance, to be a literary credit.) Then, in a different section of the jacket blurb, we’re told that Marsha Hunt “belongs in the formidable company of Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.” The novel itself is dedicated to the author’s daughter.

All this information tends to mislead. (Or, maybe it doesn’t.) This is a long, rambling narrative, told in the first person by Baby Palatine, a black woman at once knowledgeable and innocent; a church-going lady who has been married to the same nice man for 40 years. Baby Palatine functions a little like Marmee in “Little Women.” Baby knows the “right” thing to do, and lives in a godly way. Baby cooks and cleans and sews and goes to church, but as the story unwinds we see that she’s operating right on the line between order and chaos. For instance, Baby and her husband, Freddie B, run a four-plex apartment, but two of the apartments remain totally unhabitable for the length of the book.

Baby Palatine grieves because she can’t have children. Then, it seems, God himself intervenes, sending a widowed mother and her three girls--Brenda, Joy and Anndora--to live across the hall. Since the mother works all day, Baby Palatine finds herself “doing” for the family. She especially takes to Joy, whom Baby comes to think of as her own God-sent child. In fictional terms, this brings up huge questions of good and evil, and the weirdness of family dynamics; the folly of good intentions.

Brenda is huge, fat, ugly, but has a great singing voice. No one loves her--not her mother, not even Baby Palatine. Anndora is a spoiled brat (and later a heavy heroin addict). As the baby sister, she doesn’t have a clear knowledge of how or why she was born into this emotional hurricane; she can only feel the wind.

We only see Joy through the eyes of her besotted substitute mother, who, through the strength of her love, completely overlooks Joy’s various transgressions.

This is where the novel gets into some technical trouble, since the reader is all too aware that Joy is a bit of a conniving slut, since Baby Palatine tells us repeatedly who she is and what she does and then ignores it.

Marsha Hunt, like many first novelists, tries to put too much into her story.

The above material--with all its disasters and deceits and secrets and sorrows--would fill one novel to overflowing. But there’s a second novel here, the account of how Brenda, Joy and Anndora, even though they hate each other, suddenly congeal into a rock group in the late ‘70s called Bang Bang Bang, and put out one hit record, “Chocolate Chip.”

The girls go on the road, with Baby Palatine as their wardrobe mistress. We read of hotels and late nights and limos, and watch as the girls get taken up by mercilessly snobbish, caste-ridden British aristocracy. Then the force of their hatreds, their shared troubled childhood, blows the sisters apart, and the original narrative resumes.

The trouble with hidden crimes is that they’re never as terrible as they seem to be when they finally come to light. The curse that lies at the center of Joy’s tragedy is nothing compared to what has happened to Baby Palatine, or to the girls’ real mother. Everyone suffers here; everyone inflicts suffering.

The rest of the plot must be kept secret, but something can be said about the author, and the novel. Marsha Hunt is no Alice Walker, and in some ways that’s a compliment. This is social realism; there’s nothing “poetic” about it.

The novel takes a hard look at poverty (with all its attendant disasters) and the effects of torturous low self-esteem. Joy “wants to be white,” but she also wants to be free of guilt, and she’s also mad as a hornet at the things that have happened to her.

To be black and survive on any terms is a miracle, seems to be Marsha Hunt’s message. But what’s the story on this author? And on Mick Jagger? How did Marsha Hunt get from “there” to “here”?

That, we hope, will be the material of her next work.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “A Time for Wedding Cake” by Salvatore La Puma (W.W. Norton).