The Appalachia of New England : COLD TIMES, <i> By Elizabeth Jordan Moore (Summit Books: $20; 412 pp.)</i>

Geographically speaking, Maine is a kind of bony drumstick jutting out from the map of America. George Bush’s Kennebunkport digs and the late E. B. White’s Brooklin retirement home notwithstanding, Maine has long been viewed by the rest of the nation as an irrelevant appendage--remote, even expendable. Then, in 1984, Carolyn Chute’s “The Beans of Egypt, Maine”--a novel of splendid squalor--was published to critical acclaim and boffo sales, followed by Cathie Pelletier’s clever, insular “The Funeral Makers” (1986). Together these novels helped fix the state’s image in the popular mind as a slovenly pocket of poverty and poor white trash--the Appalachia of New England.

And now, Elizabeth Jordan Moore enters this raw, ramshackle company with a riveting and inspired first novel, “Cold Times,” which follows the lives of three generations of two poverty-stricken families, the Rudges and the Pembrokes. Unlike Chute, who grew up amid the destitution she so graphically describes and who writes from the inside out, college-educated Moore has lived in Maine for 20 years, working much of that time in social services. Unlike Chute, whose primitive renderings take the form of a rough-hewn, Down-East dialect as natural to her as cuss words, Moore’s work shows the restraint of an outsider and the hand of a trained writer in full command of her descriptive and narrative powers.

“Linette Pembroke got up, her hand out for the plate,” Moore writes, introducing the mother of the first generation of one family in 1958, when the novel opens. “She had red hands, Logan’s mother, and the rest of her skin was very pale. The veins showing at her temples and on the insides of her wrists and elbows were fine, like the veins in a leaf. . . . She wasn’t much over 30, but her youth was long dead in her.”

Indeed, the youth is long dead in all of Moore’s characters, even the children. Written episodically with viewpoint shifting from one character to the next and narrative skipping ahead years at a time, “Cold Times” lays out with surgical precision how a son’s childhood is ransacked by his father, how the seeds of rage and self-hatred are planted in the young.

When Logan Pembroke, now a grown man with three children, a wife and a limp, can’t raise the $500 needed to buy a used Toronado, he returns home in a funk, his anger settling on the puppy a friend gave his son Perley for his 11th birthday. Furious at his wife for defending the son, Logan wakes Perley and orders him to clean up an imagined mess, setting in motion a melee that ends as the father violently throws the animal against a door frame. (The next day, the paralyzed puppy has to be put to sleep.) Angrily disavowing any responsibility for the accident, Logan retreats to his bedroom and turns on the TV, loud.

But the impulse to condemn Logan is mollified when the reader remembers that Logan, as a teen-ager, lived in a junked school bus in his family’s yard, for which he was charged rent by a father who later vindictively shot out the bus windows, driving the boy away from home for good. Moore makes clear how intractable and intertwined are the vicious cycles of wife, child and animal abuse, of joblessness, violence and despair.

A measure of the author’s success lies in her refusal to lay blame at the feet of any one entity. Government programs set up to help the poor are not always ineffective and inflexible--sometimes they help; nor are those better-off than the Rudges and Pembrokes invariably insensitive. Often they try in small ways to help, such as the veterinarian who charges Krista Pembroke nothing for putting the puppy to sleep and the teacher who slips young Perley a winter cap during recess.

But lest a reader worry that this all makes for bleak or monotonous fare, Moore has artfully plundered fellow Mainer Stephen King’s tackle box of tricks. Once likening storytelling to fishing, King said: “Drop a bit of bait and tempt the reader to take the hook. Then set the hook.” Moore reels in the reader from Page 1 and builds her plot to a resounding climax. One can’t help but suspect that the social worker in her has provided a prescriptive but implausible emotional finish, but that’s a small bone to pick with “Cold Times.” Resisting any fantasy of Horatio Alger-ish leaps up from poverty by larger-than-life protagonists, Moore gives the reader a purchase on the lives of two hardscrabble families. The chief characteristic of those whom the unfeeling like to write off as “losers,” the author seems tosay, is that they grow old more quickly than the rest of us. With her sympathetic but unsentimental approach, this Mainer has done her adoptive state proud.