BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Mom-Daughter Story Makes for Delicious Reading : OLIVIA (or, The Weight of the Past) <i> by Judith Rossner</i> ; Crown $23, 334 pages

Judith Rossner’s new novel is a remarkable exploration of the intimate, complex connections between food and emotion, a theme that allows far more flexibility than you might expect. In “Olivia,” food has the power to arouse passion, engender hatred, inspire respect, create intimacy and even compensate for love’s absence.

The youngest child of two affectionate but preoccupied New York professors, the narrator was happiest in the kitchen with the family’s talented cooks, a situation that pleased everyone until it became clear that Caroline’s only interest in the groves of academe was what fruit and vegetables might grow there. The notion that a pair of scholarly parents might have inadvertently produced a chef at first appalled them, but after sampling their daughter’s creations, they seem to have resigned themselves to the idea quite readily. An in-house archeologist might have been more appropriate, but an in-house Escoffier was unexpectedly agreeable.

When Caroline is offered a temporary job as an au pair in Tuscany, she’s delighted to find herself a short drive from Florence, where her own family’s favorite cook is now the owner of the thriving Trattoria Cherubini. The summer is made even more exciting by the fact that her employers’ vineyard is managed by Angelo Ferrante, “an attractive yet homely Sicilian of thirty-one who, before we ever sat down together on the grass, told me he had a wife and four children in Palermo.”

Within two weeks of her arrival in Gaiole, Caroline embarked upon an affair with Angelo, a romance instigated when she prepared an amazingly authentic caponata. After tasting it, he assured her that his Sicilian family was a fiction devised to preserve his bachelorhood, a state he was now willing to change. By Christmas of the following year, Caroline was back in Florence with Angelo, the vector of her life drastically altered. At 20, she found herself simultaneously pregnant, married and chief cook at the Trattoria Cherubini; thoughts of returning to college in New York literally and permanently were on the back burner.

Olivia, the daughter who gives the book its title, was born in Florence and spent her infancy and early childhood in and around the restaurant where Mother cooked. When the marriage dissolved after years of Angelo’s blatant unfaithfulness, Olivia stayed in Italy with her father.

Although the divorce had been reasonably amicable, once Caroline returned to America, Angelo easily convinced Olivia that her mother had abandoned her, although Angelo himself would have never allowed Olivia to leave Italy. There are letters, calls and visits to Italy, but Caroline eventually and painfully resigns herself to the fact that the divorce has cost her the love of her child.

From this point on, the novel centers on the anguished relationship between Caroline and Olivia. When Olivia is in her early teens, she visits New York, reluctantly intending to remain with her mother. Angelo has remarried, abandoning the mistress Olivia loved for a woman the girl detests.

Resentful and angry over what she considers her father’s betrayal, Olivia arrives in New York seething with adolescent rage. Caroline, of course, becomes the target; the longed-for reunion with her daughter a travesty. By this time the narrator is not only a well-known cooking teacher, but also the star of a modest cable TV show. Although she realizes Olivia’s presence will create challenges and difficulties, she’s eager to confront them.

Olivia, however, resists and defies her mother’s best efforts. Instead of diminishing, her resentment grows and festers. She’s manipulative, secretive and sullen. An already tense emotional situation becomes even more highly charged when the casual friendship between Caroline and her physician-neighbor escalates into a serious romance; a love affair in which food again plays a crucial role.

When Olivia and her mother finally reach a tentative rapprochement, food is also involved. The preoccupation that once separated them will bring them back together, one more irony in a novel that simmers and overflows with literary and gastronomic ingenuity.

As an incidental bonus, Rossner has integrated some fascinating culinary history into the narrative, as well as accurate descriptions of her heroine’s particular specialties. Read “Olivia” anywhere, but keep it in the kitchen.