Self Defense or Murder? : NOTES FROM THE COUNTRY CLUB, <i> By Kim Wozencraft (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 205 pp.)</i>

A woman has been assigned to the psychiatric unit of a correctional institution, where the doctor in charge will determine whether she is competent to stand trial for murdering her husband. Meanwhile, she stacks canvas bags on the long table. These are mailbags. “I pick up a length of rope and push it through the holes at the top of the mailbag--in one hole, out the other, in one hole, out the other--pull the ends of the rope even and thread them through the openings on a clamp before using a special kind of pliers to crimp the bits of metal onto the looped ends of the rope. And then I do it again.” Her official employer is Federal Prison Industries Inc. The psychiatrist tells her she’s lucky to have landed here. Compared with other prisons, he tells her, this place is “a country club.”

Had Dostoevsky been American and female, he might have titled his tale of contemporary alienation “Notes From the Country Club.”

Wozencraft, whose highly successful first novel, “Rush,” also drew on her firsthand acquaintance with the justice system, is a former narc-squad undercover cop who wound up on the wrong side of the law and served time before entering Columbia University’s writing program. She brings to this new novel about a battered woman both a sense of narrative drama that calls to mind old Ida Lupino movies and a very modern sympathy for women who live every day in emotional imprisonment.

Any woman who knows what it feels like to be raped, hit hard, shouted down or maneuvered into debilitating isolation will feel grateful for this novel’s attention to their plight.

Cynthia Mitchell, “thirtysomething” and employed in public relations, meets Daniel, a commercial airline pilot, and leaves New York for life in Texas with him. They marry, and a year and a half later, on a camping trip, she stabs him to death with a knife.

“As long as he was alive,” she explains, “I would be beaten. As long as he was alive, I would live in terror for myself and for those I loved.”

For much of the book, before the details of the murder are revealed, we are with Cynthia in jail--with the scheduled head counts, the wire-mesh windows, the all-white seclusion room, the cast of characters that assembles in the day room. We meet Nina, in for passing bad checks (“paperhanging”); Coffee, who has committed armed robbery and gives readings of her poetry; Glenda, a lost soul who does scarf-dances; Herlinda, a Cuban who claims to be able to read the future in water; and others, all vividly and convincingly described. One of the fascinations of these characters is their language: The reader who has not done time will acquire a new vocabulary. As Kissy, describing illegal emigration activities, says, “The prosecutor accused me of subverting the fabric of the United States of America. I mean, get real. Anyone asked what I’m in for, I should tell them I’m a fabric subverter?”

Sometimes this vocabulary crashes headlong into a less interesting strain of discourse, as the narrator, who had so recently been so desperate, rather unbelievably marshalls statistics and politics to lecture the reader on domestic violence. But most of the time the prose is focused and involved. In her own state of psychic disintegration, she observes her doctor and reflects, “I’m sure he thinks the thing he’s making with his mouth is a smile, but I know very well when teeth are being bared.” She tells us how she “escaped” from her husband’s beatings: “Sometimes I got so far away from myself that it didn’t even hurt while he was kicking.”

In a scene that resonates with Shakespeare, Cynthia imagines that “my hands have gone dead. . . . I know what I’m talking about, doctor, I’ve seen it up close, you know, dead flesh, the skin of the dead , and these things in my lap are very much just that. Very much. I can’t bear this. There was so much blood.”

Murder is not all that “Notes From the Country Club” is about. Whether what Cynthia has done is self-defense is only one of the questions the book raises. “Did you think you were God?” the shrink asks her, at the beginning. In the end, the reader of this book is also compelled to ask if Cynthia thinks she is a Supreme Court judge; to ask if the lie she tells under oath is morally justifiable. For Cynthia, on the stand, says she killed in self-defense. In fact, her husband was asleep when she stabbed him.

Is our legal system adequate to deal with the problem of battered women? Is Cynthia’s rationalization--that her lie is a kind of truth--acceptable, even if it is illegal? Without blinking at the experience of domestic and sexual oppression--of male injustice to women, which persists--one wants, nevertheless, to be able to believe in a morality that prohibits, for instance, perjury. One wants to be not only right but good. Or at least lawful.

No novel has to answer such questions, of course, and no serious novel ever does. It is to Wozencraft’s credit that she lets her gripping narrative maintain its complexities, even as Cynthia, perhaps mistakenly, believes she has resolved hers. Swiftly paced, thrillingly exact, this is ultimately a novel to parse and consider.