BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Story of Loss and Pain--and Redemption : COME AND GO, MOLLY SNOW <i> by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall</i> ; W.W. Norton $21, 256 pages

“Goodby flat dirt and frozen-out orange groves, hello I-75,” says the endearing young woman whose voice we hear in “Come and Go, Molly Snow.” “If you want to play the fiddle in a bluegrass band, that’s one of the roads you’ll be on.”

Mary Ann Taylor-Hall’s first novel follows the short, fast, hot trajectory of a Kentucky fiddler named Carrie Marie Mullins, who takes to the road in pursuit of the country-music dream but skids out of control and ends up peeling peaches in the company of a couple of old ladies and a three-legged dog in Oxford County, Ky.

“They look like light itself,” says Carrie of the peaches, “as if to say, ‘You want to believe in something, believe in peaches.’ ”

And why has Carrie crashed and burned? No, it’s not yet another reprise of the Joplin-esque sex-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll saga. Carrie has loved and lost, but her loss is not the kind that ordinarily shows up in the country-Western repertoire--it is Carrie’s 5-year-old daughter, Molly, who has gone away under the most heartbreaking circumstances.

When we first meet her, Carrie’s mind is dancing a kind of tarantella, and “Come and Go, Molly Snow” is fashioned out of the random thoughts that rattle and hum in her head. She’ll be cleaning a window, contemplating the “wide, pale August weather,” conjuring up the women who cleaned the windows before her “all the way back to slave times.” And, suddenly, Carrie is riffing on some odd notion that turns into something like poetry.

“A long line of women,” Carrie is thinking as she cleans, “exactly right here, in the light, and gone, a long line of men and children, frogs, crickets, orioles, here and gone, trees, even, at last, here and gone, a steady wind blowing souls, little scraps of life, east to east, some lit up with the mica shine of consciousness, but going west all the time.”

“Come and Go, Molly Snow” is a thoroughly and genuinely American tale that describes how Carrie followed her “jazzy daddy” into music-making, how she slipped into the “waitress-and-pickup-band way of life,” how she worked her way through “a good bit of tequila and my share of the eligible male population of Central Kentucky.”

“Eligible!” says a girlfriend. “For what? Parole?”

Little Molly is a magical reminder of one of the wild nights, a baby whose father was “a nice feller, passing through,” and the baby further complicates Carrie’s already complicated life. She joins up with a band fronted by the charismatic Cap Dunlap--and ends up in his bed, too--but it is music that is her real passion.

“If you’re a hot-lick technician . . . you’d do best to stay with your all-girl band or start a band of your own,” says Carrie. “Because most bluegrass men think it’s better if the balance isn’t disturbed by a woman in a black spandex miniskirt, wanting to take her riff.”

Clearly, Carrie is one young woman who insists on taking her riff, but music is something more than a moment in the spotlight--sometimes, it’s the only balm that will ease the pain of a hard life and an unbearable tragedy. “All I want is music,” says Carrie. “I wanted to get deep into the core of every note I played with the strong fleshy part of my fingertips.”

As Carrie struggles to make sense of what happened to Molly, as she climbs out of a deep pit of suffering, her lost little girl becomes something transcendent: a “jolly explorer of the universe,” a creature whose “everlastingness” manifests itself like a glowing light from the innermost reaches of her soul. Ultimately, Molly and music seem to blend into each other and set Carrie free.

“There’s one main light in the world; everything we call color is a splitting apart of this light,” Carrie muses. “So I thought there might be one great chord, too, like the light of the sun, that separates into the notes of the world. Creation would be the splitting apart of this chord. Music would come out of it, every note, every harmony.”

There’s music in “Come and Go, Molly Snow,” the familiar twang of a country-Western lament, but something grander, too, something almost sublime: the song of a woman’s loss and pain, and the song of her redemption.