FICTION

DURABLE GOODS by Elizabeth Berg (Random House: $17; 208 pp.) Desert flowers. We think of them while reading Elizabeth Berg’s novel about a 12-year-old girl on an Army base in Texas. We think of how Katie--whose mother has died of cancer, who lives with an abusive father in a house next to a parade ground from which angry shouts echo--is able to find nourishment for her spirit in such stony soil. And we think of the unexpected blooming of mysticism on the dry and level plain of Berg’s prose.

This happens when Katie, hiding under her bed, feels a touch and hears her mother’s voice say, “You’ll be all right.” Katie realizes: “Everywhere in the world are people with secrets too much to be told: a man in China, a woman in India, bending down at the river; a baby too young to speak.”

We believe this scene because everything else in the novel is so carefully observed and so ordinary. In the part of her life not shadowed by her father’s beatings, Katie grows up: first period, first beer, first kiss. A neighbor girl gives her silly, sexist advice about how to become a woman--the kind of woman bred to complement tough, silent men like her father--but the friendship behind the advice is healing. Her older sister, Diane, runs away to Mexico with a boyfriend--an example of rebellion that gives Katie courage.

We don’t learn much about the father, a colonel, except that he, too, was treated cruelly as a child. We don’t breathe as much as we’d like of the military atmosphere that Katie takes for granted. And when Katie can look at her father with detachment and see that he is “all apart broken,” and reflect, “He is only what I was given first. There are other places to look for things,” we doubt that escape can be quite so easy. But in stories like this, what comes easiest is despair; Berg wants us to accept something harder--and we remember that we already have.