FICTION

SAVING HISTORY by Fanny Howe (Sun & Moon Press: $12.95; 220 pp.) Evil is glib; Good is tongue-tied. Evil is powerful; Good has a way of being somebody like Felicity Dumas, a 4-foot-11 single mother who is one step away from a homeless shelter. We know all this. Literature has taught us. But in this novel about the dislocations of life along national, racial, sexual, cultural and moral boundaries, Fanny Howe (“The Deep North,” “Famous Questions”) makes the battle even more of a mismatch.

Felicity often seems muddled, while Evil, in the person of Temple, a dealer in drugs and human body parts smuggled across the Mexican border, cunningly manipulates everyone else. The man who seems to be Felicity’s best hope--a liberal lawyer named Tom--is too compromised by his parents’ betrayal of his half-brother’s black father and by his own middle-class bias against Felicity to stand by her in a crisis: He has “only half the usual human heart.”

And if Good is half-hearted, or half-brained, Evil argues insinuatingly: “You can (criticize) the execs, the corporations, the banks, the pols . . . but you’re evil too because you’re inside their circle, being protected by them.” He adds: “We live in a waste economy. We produce waste . . . street kids . . . living abortions unwanted by anyone.” Such a child is Felicity’s younger daughter, Matty, who needs a liver transplant that Temple is willing to provide--at a Faustian price.

Trapped by her own best quality--motherly love--what chance does Felicity have? A slim one rather than none, as it turns out. Howe, a veteran poet, fiction writer and professor of literature at UC San Diego, has high ambitions for “Saving History.” The double meaning of the title expresses them. Howe preserves bits of repressed Southwestern history, from 1940s Red-baiting to today’s “white guys who ride around (the border) in trucks, with Soldier of Fortune magazine and beer, and shoot at people . . . for the hell of it.” She also writes the history of Felicity’s (and possibly Tom’s) religious salvation.

This is a lot to do in 220 pages. Veering from first person to third, politics to mysticism, the starkly straightforward to the lushly obscure, the novel generates so much experimental heat that its outlines blur. It’s more memorable as fragments than as a whole--though the fragmentation clearly is part of Howe’s design.