BOOK REVIEW : Courage in the Face of Emotional Poverty : PEERLESS FLATS, <i> by Esther Freud</i> , Harcourt Brace, $19.95, 218 pages

It’s much more complex than it first seems to be poor. It’s not just the lack of money; being poor affects your mind.

In “Peerless Flats” by Esther Freud, it’s missing a dad:

In the land of the patriarchy, to be too broke to snag a patriarch. It’s giving a New Year’s party and being too poor in friends--and too demoralized--to be able to invite more than one. It’s going on an all-day bus excursion to see a girl you’ve met only once, and you’ve lost the directions to her house. It’s riding in gas-guzzling vans, getting lost in traffic, and the van overheats, and you’re running out of gas. It’s locking yourself out of your own flat on the world’s rainiest night, and so you sit there, on the landing, because you can’t remember what to do next, and whatever it is, it won’t work anyway.

Lisa lives in London with her mother, Marguerite, and her 5-year-old half-brother, Max. Compared to other homeless families, they could have it worse: They live (temporarily) in a one-room flat in Peerless Flats. Max and Marguerite share the bedroom; Lisa sleeps on the living room couch. She’s 16.

There’s some more family out there--Ruby, a headstrong older sister who changes British accents faster than she changes dresses, and their dad, an elusive gambler and ne’er-do-well. Ruby is going down the drain with hard drugs.

They all live on the dole, presumably. No one goes off to work, although Lisa is diligent about attending a kind of community school of drama. What she learns there--about method acting and Bertholt Brecht--is of absolutely no use in giving her clues about the world she lives in.

That world includes her mother--sweet, lost Marguerite, who remembers the acid trips of her own youth so vividly that Lisa, having read about it somewhere, becomes convinced that people (maybe her mother’s boyfriend, maybe anyone at all) are conspiring to lace her (Lisa’s) food with LSD. This cuts down on Lisa’s food consumption; first a little, then a lot.

Living at the very bottom of the English class system can be both seductive and stressful. Lisa feels pretty strongly that she can’t go any place in life except sideways or down. Because of that, she hangs out a lot at pubs; she snorts a little heroin just to be polite. There’s no point in her adhering to the work ethic because there’s no work and no possibility of work.

But the loneliness--the institutionalized rejection--takes a terrible toll on everyone who’s poor, on everyone in this family in particular. Ruby first gets hepatitis and then goes into rehab and is finally sent off on a fool’s errand--to God knows what criminal ends in Argentina--by her gambling father.

Little Max systematically dehumanizes himself: He lives in a world full of imaginary foxes and only foxes. He then switches over to a baffling dream world of sharks and fly fishing and finally constructs a set of perfectly good armor for himself, which he must be pried out of.

Lisa, the middle child, the responsible kid, knows it is her (temporary) life’s work to take care of her befuddled mother. But it’s a toss-up who is the least prepared for this world.

Marguerite knows she’s lost Ruby by marrying a no-count second husband, and now she still reels from the loss of that second no-count husband, who has run off with a bimbette called Trudi. Marguerite cooks and cleans, but as she keeps house, the goods in it keep disappearing.

The family is caught by terrible societal centripetel force: Everything they have (and know) is falling apart far faster than they can ever hope to put it back together.

Lisa suffers horribly. She’s periodically terrified of going outside, she’s a slave to the delusion that she’s going to be poisoned by LSD, she’s knows absolutely that her father would prefer that she leave him absolutely alone. Poor kid. She’s only 16.

Who’s the audience for this book? It’s almost unbearable for a liberal to read (although it is a wonderful book). How can a country do this? Do something so loutishly irresponsible as to simply cut loose its bottom half, leave half its population to rot and starve and destroy itself in every possible way?

The conservative reader will dismiss Lisa and her family: They’re bums. They deserve everything they get.

Perhaps the ideal readers here are teen-aged children from broken American homes (even though this is set in despairing England).

Lisa lives in terror but she lives . That life, and the scant fun in it, are sufficient irritant to the ruling class and to all those rich bores who wish the poor would get on a boat somewhere and go out and sink.

Lisa’s life is her only wealth, and when her terror turns to spiky courage, lonely kids everywhere should cheer.