Nobody Home : I AM ZOE HANDKE, <i> By Eric Larsen (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; $16.95; 224 pp.)</i>

Remember in the 1960s when people played The Beatles’ “White Album” backward on the turntable so they could hear the words “Number Nine” and “Paul is dead”? I was tempted to perform a similar contortion on “I Am Zoe Handke,” Eric Larsen’s second novel, in order to make heads or tails of it. As the Beatles advised in “Helter Skelter,” I went back to the middle when I got to the top, or something like that, in the hope that the words, straightforward or inside out, might reveal their meaning to me. Maybe there was something to the “Paul is dead” craze, but I never figured out what it was. I can say the same about this book.

On the surface, “I Am Zoe Handke” is about the relationship between Zoe and her mother from 1941 to 1975. It is unclear why the mother, a nameless telephone operator in Three Islands, Ill., flies off into unpredictable rages against Zoe and against her own mother too.

As in some of Ingmar Bergman’s early movies, the mother’s anger appears to have no social context or discernible psychological motive. Its existence is like a law of nature in the days before Newtonian physics: Implicitly manifest, it is ultimately mysterious. The consequence of the mother’s behavior, however, is less inexplicable. Throughout her life, Zoe experiences an unremitting sense of dislocation, “as if I were floating a certain distance over the treetops.”

Indeed, “I Am Zoe Handke” may be one of the most sensorily deprived novels since Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “La Jalousie.” Deafness and blindness take the place of conventional plot and characterization. “There are no sounds at all except, now and then, in brief choruses, the lazily rising and falling cries of cicadas,” Zoe observes about her childhood.

In one of the narrator’s countless ruminations about her disturbed mother, she recalls “my mother’s way of looking at me, during periods of difficulty or anger, as though she did not see me, or as though I weren’t even there and she was looking through me.”

As time passes, Zoe turns this lack of sensation into a romanticized vision of her family history. About her paternal grandfather’s hometown, she says that it was “an untroubled and comfortably event-less place suspended in unbroken quietness, stillness and deep-rooted tranquillity.” If there is history, psychology, or consciousness among these pages, they “fell gradually into silence.”

Tantalizingly, the narrator hints at family “stories of quarrels, thefts, fistfights, and runaway horses.” Bring them on, I pleaded with the author!

The trouble with “I Am Zoe Handke” is that it is all explanation. The reader rarely observes any on-the-scene inter-action between characters. To be fair, this may be Larsen’s conscious narrative strategy to present a less than reliable first-person narration. But to my way of thinking, Zoe’s self-absorption is only annihilating. It precludes an external world whose characters can comment on Zoe’s perceptions. It also ignores all the political and cultural storms of the post-war era. It’s not just that nothing happens in this book, it’s that it’s impossible to figure out what happened to make Zoe a disjointed, fragmented human being.

In fact, a dictionary definition of schizophrenia applies to the narrator’s persona: “a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.” Larsen may be suggesting that this is an acceptable state for Zoe to live in. Frankly, she sounds unhinged. Always intellectualizing, she views athletics, for example, as the absence of stillness. Her mandatory swimming class leads her to see “the comforting strength and the deep, communal, uplifting steadiness of one’s relation to the dead that were to be found within the world of active, effortful, organized sport.” Whatever self Zoe has is divorced, pathetically or laughably, from spontaneous feeling. When she decides not to go swimming in a pool full of naked men, she says that “my presence, out of keeping with convention, would have been only disruptive and unwelcome.” Well, yes.

Now, would you expect a woman like Zoe to end up happily married and the mother of two children? I don’t know how she gets from here to there, but her homey family life at the end of the book is another one of those pre-Newtonian mysteries. The reader must take it on faith that a woman can grow up with a vaguely abusive mother, suffer some sort of psychic and emotional deterioration, and then stay in some anomalously workable marriage. Without therapy. Lord knows what effect the intensely cerebral Zoe will have on her kids, whom she describes generically as “my young daughters.”

If the author intended Zoe to be a discombobulated egotist I apologize for my philistinism. My impression of “I Am Zoe Handke,” however, is of a narrator whose ethereal voice vanishes into the nothingness of her preoccupations, and before I knew it, she was gone.