Round Peg in a Square Hole : LITTLE PEG, <i> By Kevin McIlvoy (Atheneum: $18.95; 288 pp.)</i>

The Little Peg of the title is the narrator of Kevin McIlvoy’s new novel. It is also Peg O’Crerieh’s nickname, a demeaning reference to her size--she’s well over 6 feet and close to 200 pounds.

The only person who never teased her about it was her dead brother Ben. Ben returned from Vietnam in 1971, legless, armless, an invisible lump under bandages, and died. Within a month, Peg committed herself to the Everview Residential Treatment Center, a psychiatric halfway house where we meet her in 1988, at the start of the novel.

As in McIlvoy’s first book, “The Fifth Station,” the memory of a dead brother lodges at the core of the narrator’s sensibility. Here, in “Little Peg,” McIlvoy presents us with a surprising and disturbing exploration of the aftermath of war for one female survivor.

Peg’s part-time job, while at Everview, is teaching creative writing in the Nontraditional Program at the local branch of New Mexico State University. Her one writing requirement is that all her students must use her, Peg O’Crerieh, as a major character. Outrageous. And yet it is from these wonderful stories, dated like fossil finds and rewritten by Peg, that McIlvoy crafts much of his quirky fiction.

Besides the “student” stories, Peg uses her own therapeutic “self-reports,” a friend’s letters, her colleagues’ poems, and newspaper articles to create, and then to inhabit, her own identity. All this makes for a complexly layered text, but the method is very much the point. By the end of the book, we’ve witnessed a conglomerate act of self-archeology, the piecing together of a viable--even liberated--human being, story by story, realization by realization.

The substance of the novel is Peg’s odyssey toward mental health. She must pass through cobwebs of dependencies and responsibilities. In a world where confrontation is taboo, she must learn to do it out of choice and not infantile rage. She begins by deciding to leave Everview and return to her husband James and their daughter Molly, the daughter he’s raised. To leave, Peg must withdraw from her daily menu of tranquilizers and anti-depressants, and separate from Francis, her roommate-cum-soulmate. At home, she must find ways to let Molly need her.

But her most fateful relationship is with her husband James. “Before I had let him touch me, he was ordinary to me, another boy who wasn’t even my kind of boy. Now, he had kissed and held my body. He had bruised my body. And it is still inexplicable to me how much more complex that made him when it might reasonably have made him only a jerk.”

Peg dates and marries James a couple of weeks before he leaves for Camp Pendleton as an enlisted Marine. “We wondered even then, in 1967, if it was a just engagement. We wondered, but we committed our lives to it.” James returns from Vietnam physically intact but emotionally frozen.

“Little Peg” heats up with each story, each letter. When Francis runs away from Everview, Peg summons her own private army of friends and family to form a search party on the back streets of Las Almas where Francis often wanders. Asking for help releases much of Peg’s own locked-away feelings, and she begins to open up to James, Molly, her older, estranged brother Andrew, and her students--all the people she’s loved, abandoned, and used--with new directness. With wit and honesty, she accepts the anger and resilience that her vulnerable, restless students show her. And with new-won strength, she comes to terms with Ben’s death and James’ spiritual coma, making what finally happens count.

Kevin McIlvoy is a fine writer, who clearly delights in the act of making prose and attending to the mysteries of character. Through Peg, he writes: “I have never been mystified by the physical similarity of friends, spouses, lovers, any cellmates locked in horrible or happy prolonged cohabitation. The same diet, the same furniture, the same bathroom and shower fixtures, the same surfaces under our feet and the sounds through the same bright-white plaster walls, the seasonal rhythms of natural light, all the shared mundanities lathe us as if we were the supplest tulipwood.” It’s lovely writing.

But the best, most moving stories in the novel are the ones narrated by men--such as one by a Chicano boy who dates Peg in 1963, or another narrated by Peg’s father. These voices are uncannily authentic, and charge their stories with strong current. This very strength raises a question. Although McIlvoy writes with the delicacy and respect any male writer ought to have when he risks writing from a woman’s point of view, one cannot help but ask why he has chosen to speak for a woman in the first place.

McIlvoy’s epigraph to the novel clearly shows he has gender on his mind: “For the wives, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers of Vietnam veterans, who offered no less than their lives.” Yet McIlvoy’s instinct as a writer is for place.

Las Almas, New Mexico, is one of those places where information comes secondhand, as echoes of events that happened elsewhere. It is far from the front lines of war or even the more knowing, fashionable worlds of the big-college campuses or coastal cities. McIlvoy digs deep into the elsewhere-ness of Las Almas, where blue-collar respectability considers explicit TV coverage of the war “deplorable,” a kind of betrayal. Local newspapers relegate Vietnam stories to Page 5. Even tragedy is oblique, expressed through symbols, like the jar of Hot Pepper Rings that Peg drops the night before Ben leaves for Basic Training. Compound this with what the male world offers its women--silence or evasion, especially where pain or love are concerned--and you have the disenfranchised world of “Little Peg.”

In McIlvoy’s rendering, everyone gives his life to one war or another.