Rooted on Island Soil : SLEEPING BEAUTIES, <i> By Susannah Moore (Alfred A. Knopf: $22; 231 pp.)</i>

A case could be made that Susannah Moore is fundamentally a writer about place--about the tug of places and the need to flee them; about how in the end they heal us. She brings her unique vision to her native Hawaii, imbuing it with atavistic powers. In “Sleeping Beauties,” Moore’s main character, Clio, still has a totemic animal, the lizard, remarkable for its adaptability: “Modest, small, nocturnal. . . . He demands very little. He does great service.”

When Clio goes to her Aunt Emma, requesting to change her totem, Emma argues against it, stating that the giant lizard god, Mo’o, “can change at will into different shapes.” This will be Clio’s task--to alter herself and her life--and the lizard is the perfect metaphor for her, a survivor if there ever was one.

While Moore writes passionately about neglectful mothers and damaged daughters, about female sexuality and passivity, it is her profound sense of place that distinguishes her writing--a place that is as dense, lush and sensuous as the language she uses to describe it. It is difficult not to be swept up in a land where monkeypod trees, orange tamarind and the purple flower of the kukui trees grow, and Emma’s house, where Clio goes to live, is call Wisteria House.

Hawaii is Moore’s terrain and in the first 50 pages of “Sleeping Beauties” we are firmly grounded in that terrain. Moore writes well about Hawaii in transition from being an island of water gods and family totems to a place poised for tourism and development with its “Filipino dancers in pink cellophane hula skirts and Japanese children waving in front of the cement memorial at Pearl Harbor and haole girls swimming with sedated porpoises in hotel lagoons.”

There is a fairy tale quality to this book, though it is an adult fairy tale. Thirteen-year-old Clio, abandoned by her mother, Kitty, and ignored by her father and cruel stepmother, comes to Wisteria House with its decrepitude, its embracing palms and plants, its lovesick Chinese servant and, of course, its stories.

Clio has been stripped of all the touchstones of family life. Kitty has long fled Hawaii for a new life on a ranch in Australia and her stepmother, Burta, starves the children, not only for love, but even for food (one of the more chilling aspects of the novel is the cruelty of which Burta seems capable). Her brother Dix has been sent off to school. Her father’s indifference is closer to neglect.

At Wisteria House Clio is taken in by her Aunt Emma, the keeper of the language who with her talk-story about Hawaii conveys and records the lore of her race. Clio is filled with a desire to understand the forces that made her. (This is one of her survival skills). And this means, at least for Emma, to know what it means to be Hawaiian--to have your gods, your flowers, your hula and your history.

Clio smells. She smells the ginger and the resin of turpentine trees. When she is first with her Hawaiian lover, Henry, she sniffs the lime on his hands. She also smells danger. At each crucial junction of the novel her sense of smell acts as a signal to Clio. Perhaps in this she is most like the lizard. Clio is a tomboy by mainland standards, but an island girl by Hawaiian. Fearlessly she spends her childhood going to the dark pond on her parents’ property to swim naked and cleanse herself. This implies a whole code of female honor. “Island girls do not indulge in self-pity, or alimony, or pain-killers.” It is this resilience that keeps Clio going.

But when Clio, who has grown up and becomes a researcher in the department of oceanic myths, falls in love with Tommy Haywood--a Hollywood idol, one of the top four paid actors in Hollywood--and marries him within two weeks of meeting him, the lifeblood seems drained from this book. It is further lost when Clio leaves Hawaii for California and Morocco.

Tommy is a true Hollywood cliche. He calls her “babe,” gazes at himself endlessly in the mirror. “He was quick at his lovemaking, his head buried in her neck, his small hands gripping her shoulders. He jumped up as soon as he regained his breath, and went to the mirror. . . . He smiled at himself.” And later, “he rolled down the window and looked away from her, his face vacant in the neon lights of Malibu.”

While it is obvious that Clio wants simultaneously to flee and be taken care of, what draws her to Tommy--or he to her--seems inexplicable. It is hard to know what a woman who was a researcher in oceanic myths would see in someone who responds, regarding her desire to work, “Work?” He bangs his racket on the back of a metal chair. . . . “When have you ever worked in your whole life? What do you do? You write things down and you record things about dead people and you read. Big deal.”

Tommy would be a mere stereotype of a Neanderthal male were he not abusive, dangerous and a stalker. Not to mention very rich and powerful. Meanwhile Clio seems to vacillate pointlessly between arch feminism and a shocking passivity. It is not until Tommy grows from being simply vapid to becoming a serious threat and Clio returns to Hawaii to heal from a beating that nearly killed her that the energy returns to the novel.

In a sense Clio’s story really begins when she comes home and the rest of the novel could easily have been rendered in flashback, thus muting the California material. One wonders why Moore has opted for a linear, almost movie-like narrative when so much of the story, especially about Tommy, could come in flashback. One wishes she had settled on the flow between past and present that she used in “My Old Sweetheart.”

There is also an annoying tendency to be too philosophical. When women get together, the talk drifts to feminist issues or, in the case of Emma, to discussions of “expectation” and “reality.” Poignant moments are undermined--such as Clio’s encounter with her soon-to-be-lover, Henry, on the island where she has gone to escape Tommy’s murderous rage--with lines such as “memory is a gesture too.”

But when we are out of the world of California cliches and self-conscious metaphysical musing--when Moore just lets the story tell itself, she writes scenes that take your breath away. There is the remarkable Love Contest, which Clio and her brother devise the summer their mother moves to Australia. The children gather all the household pets--dogs, cats, pigs, birds--and try to lure the animals into their arms. The one who gathers the most animals wins. And nothing can prepare the reader for Burta’s cruelty when she ends the Love Contests by getting rid of all the animals.

There is the pathetic--and telling--list of objects Kitty sends Clio over the years--”a stuffed koala bear, a windup bear that played ‘Waltzing Matilda.’ Clio had seven of them.” And romantic scenes that move us such as Clio’s night swim with her lover-to-be Henry after a horrific encounter at her stepmother’s house. After the swim, “she smiled in the darkness. She realized that he could not see that she was smiling. ‘I’m smiling, ‘ she whispered as she rose on to her knees under the wet pine branches and settled herself again on the dry ground, like a queen.”

When Clio and the reader are back on island soil, both breathe a sign of relief. This novel evokes in me a creature from another island--a frog indigenous to Puerto Rico called the coqui. It is called coqui because this is what its beautiful song sounds like. But if you take the coqui away from its island, it stops singing and dies.

This same problem seems to exist in “Sleeping Beauties.” When Susannah Moore is on her island, she sings as sweetly as any writer can. And yet when she goes away from it, the magic doesn’t transplant itself. But when writing about Hawaii, this book sweeps over the reader with its water, its smells, its heart-rendering scenes.