The Orphans of Society’s Storm : ISABEL OUT OF THE RAIN, <i> by Catherine Gammon,</i> Mercury House, $18.95 hardcover, $10.95 paper, 199 pages

Because it is difficult to understand, difficult to follow, and because rational thought is the last thing on its mind, it might be easy to dismiss “Isabel Out of the Rain,” especially because it’s a first novel. But that, I think, would be a mistake.

It’s always a puzzle about hardcover books and who buys them: who are the people with the $20 (in this case you have a choice of the $10 paperback as well) who will plunk their money down for any book? Novels are probably most often bought as presents. Who needs this book as a present?

By answering that deceptively banal question, it’s possible to put this novel into focus, into its proper niche.

Young women who have had hideous childhoods need this. Females who--having little wealth and no stability--have substituted arcane learning and a pervasive sense of style as their ways of getting through the days and nights, will love and cherish this book.

Young women whose parents drink, who refuse, in the ongoing scheme of things to get older, to become adult, to take care of their children. Young women whose fathers have abused them can certainly use this book. Young women whose mothers are prettier than they are, and have the bad taste to keep on sleeping with very cute men, need this book.

And girls who feel bored and sad and ordinary and strung out and hard up for a drama or a myth to hang their own lives on, need this book--to put on their sideboards and their coffee tables, to carry with them to school. Because maybe they too are “Isabel Out of the Rain.”

The novel opens with an anonymous woman who picks up a darling guy in a bar. They repair to her room, and three weeks later, after gallons of liquor and quantities of somnambulant sex, she’s dead. For these weeks, she has been remembering her childhood, the way it was drenched in alcohol, and that father who abused her.

Then, in a move to another part of the city, we encounter Russell, a man of 40, whose life would have been over, except that a couple of years before, Isabel, a girl of 16, came into a restaurant off the street and offered him sex for food.

He has refrained from taking sexual advantage of her, but brings her home to his lonely apartment and she’s been living there ever since. The point here is not that Russell “rescues” Isabel, but that she, with her beauty, her made-up stories, her airmail letters that come to her from all over the world, has rescued Russell from his own dead life.

Russell’s past is rooted in Vietnam. When he was a soldier-kid in that war, he had a best friend, Billy Santana. Those boys spent some little time taking women away from each other.

There was Dominique, a French citizen of Saigon, who moved from Santana to Russell, and then in 1975 a girl named Lucinda, who moved from Russell to Santana.

Beyond that, Russell, who also has one of those drinking, heavily sexual mothers, has a young half-brother, Cheyenne. Russell has deserted Cheyenne, leaving the kid unloved and at loose ends.

Somebody killed that girl back in the prologue: Who was it? Someone out of this crowd is probably Isabel’s father. Who is it?

A reader from the mundane world might pose the question how could Isabel’s mother allow her to live a gypsy life on New York’s streets for years at a time, and how, since life on New York streets is undeniably hard, can Isabel look so good, act so together, do so well, and hold her own with all those guys with exotic names: Santana, Cheyenne, and even Russell (who is usually called Jack)?

The answer is sad. There are thousands of girls whose mothers are still acting out their own adolescent dreams, whose fathers aren’t above making a pass at them from time to time, who have grown up in homes drenched in Scotch and redolent of hard drugs.

The best weapon of these girls is to imagine themselves out of their problem, to turn their insignificance into significance, to make a story out of the chaos they’ve endured. “Isabel Out of the Rain” is just such a work of the imagination.

And it should be read, cherished, held as a talisman for other young kids, orphaned by our societal storm.

Next: John Wilkes reviews “A Physicist on Madison Avenue” (Princeton University Press).