Getting a Grip on Mom : LILIANE: Resurrection of the Daughter, <i> By Ntozake Shange (St. Martin’s Press: $18.95; 292 pp.)</i>

Ntozake Shange, a multitalented writer best known for her play, “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” and the novel, “Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo,” in her third novel offers a daring portrait of a black woman artist re-creating herself out of social and psychological chaos, the fragmentation that haunts our time, our nation. Ourselves.

Liliane is undergoing a traditional psychoanalysis. Brief dialogues headed “Room in the Dark” preface the more novelistic chapters, allowing us to eavesdrop on therapeutic sessions in which Liliane pursues a deeper understanding of her anxieties and anger, a fuller understanding of her feeling for her parents. Her task is to learn to listen to herself. As her analyst says about the panic Liliane feels as she tries to do this, “It’s not really the silence you believe you can’t survive. It’s the noise in your head that you only hear in silence.”

Daughter of Judge Parnell Lincoln, a powerful man who “kept score,” and S. (for Sunday) Bliss LaFontaine Lincoln, who left the Judge to run off with a white man, Liliane is burdened by grievances she will learn to acknowledge and deal with, but as the book opens she is still finding her way in the world: “I travel a lot. I look at men and take some home or leave the country, borders have never intimidated me. My passport is in order and I carry letters of credit, perfume, four fancy dresses and six nightgowns. . . . I paint.” She believes in “honor, color, and good sex.”

There is a lot of sex in this book, but there is also a love of language. Liliane describes what she sees and feels when she paints: “Women wrapped in blue-black swishes of spun cotton float through the streets. . . . I am allowing my fingers to float as the women do, over the cobblestones, reddened dirt paths, billows of dust following donkeys, mules, bicycles.”

In the narrative chapters, language is often presented in monologues, voices inflected and rising off the page to reach the reader’s ear as well as eye. One may think of these chapters as soliloquies, even, for there is an interesting theatricality to the book’s structure, as if it could be dismantled and reassembled, like a series of stage sets. Roxie, Lollie, Bernadette--friends of Liliane from childhood--speak in turn, as do some of the lovers, each individuated voice giving us another “view” of Liliane but also enlarging the novel’s historical reach, taking us from the North to the South and back again. Yet it is Liliane who is at the center and holds our attention, as she embodies and makes personal a universal struggle to overcome divisive hatreds, become whole.

“White folks got us so tangled up and wound round ourselves we can’t live without them or the idea where we can touch it. If we live like white folks don’t exist, like they don’t matter, they kill us. . . . If we act decent, they treat us like fools. If we spend our lives hating them, we look as foolish and psychotic as they do to the rest of the world.”

Why, she wants to know, did her mother leave her--for it was not only her father who was left--and how could she have left her for a white man? As Liliane sees it, “She walks out the door, leaves me behind, goes off with her lover to start a new life, and I have to live with her over and over again, because all I had was memories. I had memories and pictures. Memories and stories I’d tell sometimes. That’s all I had.” Liliane’s healing takes place as she begins to understand the limited choices her mother had and that those choices need not determine hers.

A final soliloquy by another friend, Victor-Jesus, a photographer, provides a kind of dream-resurrection, a semi-surrealistic chapter in which all the characters, even Liliane’s “dead beau” Sawyer and Sawyer’s fragile, tenuously surviving sister Hyacinthe, even poor murdered Roxie--as Liliane says, “Our friends, our ghosts, and the gods we love”--appear in the pictures he takes of Lollie’s wedding. Lollie is marrying one of Liliane’s ex-boyfriends, but Liliane, happy for them, is there. Reunited in joy with family and friends, Sunday Bliss’ daughter, following her journey through history and self, has returned to a new life, or the old life newly cherished.

In “Liliane,” Shange has written a novel that manages to be both risky and stylish. It moves fast and carries the reader into areas of sensibility not always entered. Of “memories and pictures,” “memories and stories,” she has made a novel that takes its place on the shelf--by now, shelves--of exciting fiction by contemporary black writers.