BOOK REVIEW : Abuse, Self-Hatred Are Elements of a Truly Horrifying L.A. Story : THICKER THAN WATER, <i> by Kathryn Harrison,</i> Random House, $19.95, 288 pages

With no disrespect to Steve Martin, “Thicker Than Water” is a true L.A. story. This is the story that is repeated after school on clean bed spreads in little girls’ rooms between brooding about lipstick and nail polish, making prank calls and getting dressed up in outlandish outfits.

This is the certain kind of story that unfolds in nice houses above Sunset Boulevard--this particular time in Stone Canyon, right there in Bel-Air--during long afternoons when teen-age girls giggle. But out beyond the bedroom door, the reality is hideous, too hideous to encompass. In its horrifying familiarity, it feels just like home.

Isabel (whose name we don’t catch until halfway through this story) lives in Stone Canyon with her grandparents. Isabel summers in La Jolla, goes with her girlfriend’s parents to the Self Realization Fellowship Temple down on Sunset Boulevard by the beach.

Isabel stays home and pastes in Blue Chip Stamps. She watches the Jackie Gleason Show with her grandfather. She longs to be a June Taylor Dancer. She goes to a good prep school.

But here’s the other story. Her mother, beautiful, well bred, of European-Jewish extraction, met a white trash kid when she was 16, got pregnant, got married and dumped the guy--who went to live out in the Mojave Desert in Needles . The mother stays at home until she quarrels with her own parents and goes to live in a tiny apartment, neglecting to leave her address or phone number. Isabel is 5.

It’s not that Isabel’s mother doesn’t come around. She does come around, on weekends, and gets ready for her elaborate dates. She won’t let Isabel sit on her lap, for fear she’ll get varicose veins.

She plays around with Isabel, but she molests her too, inserting things like tooth brushes when and where she shouldn’t. No one will ever know. Isabel will never tell. The question never even comes up.

And Isabel grows up just a little bit on the screwy side, starving herself, bashing her fingernails with stones, beating herself in secret, and later, dosing herself with an emetic, so that she will not only throw up after every meal but feel terrible while she’s doing it.

Anything to feel. Something.

Isabel’s grandmother tells her it’s OK to have a kid if she gets pregnant. Her mother takes her to get a diaphragm when she’s 15 and still a virgin. Isabel goes to the beach, and giggles, and shop lifts, while the single, serious, terrible, unspeakable fact remains totally intractable and unexplainable: Her mother can’t stand her.

On a “good” day, her mother never thinks of her at all. (And for those who think: Oh, just another story about someone whose mother didn’t love her, she had enough to eat, didn’t she? She has a swell roof over her head! She went to a good school! I remind you of the proverb: “Better a dinner of bitter herbs where love is, than a meal of stalled ox where there is no love at all.”)

The second half of this novel takes a terrible turn. The young and beautiful mother is felled by a particularly virulent cancer. Isabel’s father, wild-eyed from the desert and hideously vile, turns up. Isabel enters into a kind of self-destructive revenge that almost destroys her. Because anything goes in Los Angeles!

Behind the fragrance of eucalyptus; behind the neatly stacked expensive underwear; the forever-strange family photographs; the long, somnolent days at the beach; the La Brea tar pits; the sobbing kids on school buses, there remains this vibrating, awful fact: If your own mother detests you, she licenses you to be an outlaw. Your soul is lost; your life is damned.

This is the story of kids I went to high school with. This is the story of a particular California nightmare: The child who is born, in easy, even luxurious circumstances, and soon, way too soon, notices that her fate on Earth is to be discarded and loathed.

There should be a snappy ending to this review, but you know what? There’s no snappy ending to this kind of story. To tell it at all is the only (limited) triumph.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist” by Victor Weisskopf (Basic Books).