BOOK REVIEW : A Literate Portrait of Family’s Disintegration : FORMS OF SHELTER: <i> By Angela Davis-Gardner</i> , Ticknor & Fields, $19.95, 276 pages

Angela Davis-Gardner’s first novel is as fluid as a glassy stream in rural North Carolina where “Forms of Shelter” takes place.

The theme is familiar--a family’s slow, painful disintegration into ruin--but rarely has an author confronted more honestly one of the deepest betrayals of the notion of family, the sexual abuse of a child by a trusted adult.

The book opens with a haunting image of a 5-year-old child named Beryl riding on her father’s shoulders, crossing dew-laden fields in the early morning light, happy in the safety of her father’s love as they head out together to feed her new pony, which she both fears and loves.

Later that day her father disappears, leaving only a note. He’s gone to Chicago to become a jazz musician. It’s the last time Beryl, her brother Stevie, or her mother Joanne will ever see the man, though his name and face will continue to haunt them.

How can a family dissolve so quickly? So irreversibly? Bewildered by the loss, Beryl attempts to construct an ordered world of cause and effect, believing that through her own feeble efforts at goodness she can will her father back.

Instead, she finds herself stuck for a number of years in the tense atmosphere of her grandparents’ house, where her grandmother attempts to dispense kindness while Grandpa, a stuffy and religious man, drones on about God and sin.

Beryl, who narrates the tale, witnesses the progressive decline of her mother who tries to mend her life by going back to college. Instead, her frail, shattered mother succumbs to a depression so deep she cracks up and is hospitalized.

Enter Dr. Jack Fonteyn, classics instructor, translator of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis,” a smooth-talking, polished suitor who instantly begins to “transform” Beryl’s mother:

“She’d been a sad sack, a shop girl, a bright but untutored mind. He’d gotten the hair off her neck into a sleek bun; bought her clothes that didn’t look small-town; persuaded her that one Tolstoy was worth a thousand Edna Ferbers.” Most importantly, he encourages Beryl’s mother to think she can be a writer.

Whether out of gratitude, or desperation, Beryl’s mother marries Jack and moves her children into his house, believing, as she tells Beryl repeatedly, that he has become the family’s “savior.”

From the very moment Beryl is introduced to her prospective step-father, the reader knows something is wrong, and knows what it is. There’s a strange, subtle sexual tension between the child and adult, a predatory and unpleasant attentiveness on the part of Jack, a flattered yet confused response from Beryl.

But Dr. Jack Fonteyn is so likable, so educated and intelligent, so sensitive to children, though he gazes a little too long at Beryl, letting his eyes travel over her Botticelli-like face and down her long, coltish legs.

In his country house, a modern-glass behemoth with a tennis court and beehives, a tenuous domesticity begins. Beryl’s mother writes. Jack translates Ovid. And Stevie and Beryl are showered with gifts.

Although Beryl initially dislikes her new stepfather, she finds herself won over, particularly when he builds her a treehouse near the tennis court, from which she can spy on him tending his beehives.

It’s a fitting metaphor that Jack is a beekeeper. In Beryl’s telling of events, there isn’t a moment--including the instances of Jack’s honey-tongued sweetness--when you don’t also feel his potential for havoc, just as you do when there’s a bee buzzing near your face.

The sense of menace builds slowly throughout the book. In Jack’s house, things begin to turn sour. Beryl watches her mother and stepfather whittle away at each other’s sanity, and at the same time, enters puberty and discovers the minefield of sexual feelings awaiting her.

What’s astonishing is that when the inevitable happens in a fierce, highly symbolic scene in the beekeeping shed, we’re still surprised. We expect the ogre to be ruthless, venal, cunning. Jack is much worse, he is a freckled, leering rapscallion, a moral amnesiac, a rapacious, betraying Everyman.

“Forms of Shelter” doesn’t take the easy way out. It concludes on a note of hard pain as the adult Beryl finally admits the truth to her brother Stevie after their mother’s funeral. But that truth creates a new place inside of her that feels something like peace.

For anyone who has ever suffered the emotional savagery of childhood sexual abuse, the message is clear.

It is possible to survive it, to talk about it, to go on with courage. It’s also possible to write about it and create, as Angela Davis-Gardner has done, a deeply moving piece of literature.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “This Earth of Mankind” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (William Morrow).