BOOK REVIEW : A Mother’s Journey to World of Change : LOST IN JERSEY CITY: A Novel <i> by Paula Sharp</i> , HarperCollins, $20, 304 pages

In the last few pages of Paula Sharp’s novel, “Lost in Jersey City,” the major characters gather at a dock across from Manhattan, to do some crab fishing.

The smell of mint toothpaste is in the air from a nearby Colgate plant; Ellis Island is out of sight but just around a bend in the Hudson, Angel Rodriguez tells his neighbor Ida Terhune. Angel is amused to see Ida, the novel’s heroine, staring at the empty stretch of water to which he had motioned, but his attitude is not patronizing.

In fact, thinks Angel, “Ida Terhune was altogether more likable, now that she had murdered someone. She seemed more relaxed.”

Angel’s thumbnail appraisal isn’t strictly accurate, but it is true that Ida’s first few months in Jersey City have changed her. She intended as much: When Ida loaded her two children into a 1970 Chrysler New Yorker and left Baton Rouge, and the children’s stepfather, she hoped New Jersey would offer a new and better life.

In fact, it didn’t--until fate lent a hand and gradually, carefully, transformed Mrs. Terhune (as Ida once liked to think of herself) into a woman with her own identity. By the book’s end, Ida is no longer a stranger in a strange town nor a mad, repressed ex-housewife, but a working woman with a past, some prospects and a budding sense of self.

“Lost in Jersey City” is not a book you’ll want to read in a single sitting, and its leisurely pace, early on, can be frustrating. But stick with it: Sharp’s third work of fiction--she has also written “The Woman Who Was Not All There” and “The Imposter: Stories About Netta and Stanley”--proves to be a wonderful novel, as easy to underestimate as it is difficult to pigeonhole.

Sharp gives away the book’s central theme in the opening sentence--it reads, in part, “If you venture too far from home, life will wrestle you to the ground”--but her development of Ida’s story is so beautifully controlled, and her sympathy for human idiosyncracy so deep, that the book holds constant and agreeable surprises. Sharp does here what Louis Malle does in so many of his films: She makes the odd event seem inevitable, the natural effect of an unnatural occurence.

Ida has been persuaded to come to Jersey City by her oldest and perhaps only friend, Betty Trombley, who is as brash as Ida is shy. Each “wanted the world to keep its distance,” Sharp writes, but “Ida hid from the world like a mole, and Betty scared it off by fighting everything in her path like some raccoon with rabies.”

While living in Betty’s apartment, however, Ida can no longer remain underground, and soon she is caught up in Betty’s ongoing battle with her menacing, scurrilous landlord. Try as she might to stay above the turmoil, Ida is soon in the middle of it; her new acquaintances are all the landlord’s enemies and her Chrysler kills the landlord’s son.

“Lost in Jersey City” is really two books, the first showing Ida and her children adapting to a new environment and the second describing the car accident and trial that changed Ida’s life. The difference between the two halves is somewhat jarring, but Sharp manages to bring as much warmth and dexterity to the more conventional trial scenes as she does to the earlier narrative.

Sharp’s reasons for arranging the book as she does are obvious. She is a criminal defense lawyer, and often must wonder about her clients’ lives before and beyond the legal system: Who are these people, really, those men and women we encounter for the most part only glancingly, and what has brought them to their current circumstances?

That’s the sort of question never far from the heart of Virginia Woolf’s work, and it’s very much a part of Sharp’s too. Unlike Woolf, however, Sharp tends toward the the sly and amusing rather than the profound and philosophical, making “Lost in Jersey City” that rare thing, a comic novel of substance. Woolf, I suspect, would have loved it--and perhaps even been a little envious.