BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A New Life That Fails to Suppress a Painful Past : YOUR NAME HERE <i> by Chris Mazza</i> , Coffee House Press, $12.95, paper; 256 pages

Imagine a pair of diarists, confiding in each other across a 10-year time span. Diarist Two, a woman in her mid-30s named Erin Haley, is writing her entries in 1989; Diarist One, Corinne who’s a decade younger, abandoned her journal in 1979.

Both women work at TV stations: Corinne in Pine Bluff, Ark. and Erin in Redding, Calif., though when she introduces herself, she’s staying at a hotel in downtown San Diego, where Corinne’s journals have been stored.

While this opening suggests a routine research assignment for a TV anchorwoman, “Your Name Here” is anything but formulaic.

Erin and Corinne are the same person, though if you knew Corinne, you might not recognize her in her new incarnation as Erin. She now has a unisex haircut, a total of nine piercings in her ears and is considerably thinner than she was at 24. Off duty, she prefers to dress like a biker (Honda, not Trek or Cannondale), but on camera, she fills the holes in her ears with pancake make-up and wears lace-collared blouses with pearls.

She doesn’t tell us what she wore as Corinne; only that she hadn’t yet embarked upon multiple piercings.

Is Erin a recovering amnesiac? A transvestite? Someone in the Federal Witness Protection Program? The first guess, somewhat unfortunately, comes closest to the truth, though the second or third options would have been more fun and infinitely less confusing.

As the book is written, Erin is distinguished from Corinne merely by a couple of points in type size and the dates of the entries, subtleties easy to overlook. The two women have similar jobs, identical prose styles, and exceedingly bad luck with men.

Corinne has fewer holes in her ears, but only because she hasn’t yet started puncturing them when she’s miserable--a curious form of therapy, but it seems to work for her, though she’s rapidly running out of space.

Sadly, this fine distinction doesn’t help the reader much in telling the ladies apart. But should it? Need it? If Erin/Corinne can’t tell herself apart, why should we worry? Not knowing who she is could just be the whole point of the novel.

No, that’s only part of the point. The title, “Your Name Here,” is also an invitation--an actual command--to identify with the narrator, who has been sexually abused in a too-horrendous way.

Mazza is asking us to believe that what happened to Corinne could happen to any of us, provided we’d been drunk and stoned in a hot tub in 1980, at a party with a bunch of yahoos from the TV station.

After this unspeakable experience, a long recovery and some cosmetic surgery, Corinne wisely suppressed her memories. She buried her former self and became Erin Haley, a voluntary amnesiac and quite an efficient one, though still with Corinne’s poor judgment of male character.

Nevertheless, she’s muddling along fairly well until her current lover, Garth, decides to return to his wife and family.

After Garth deserts her, Erin says, “Your name goes here, Garth,” adding another layer of meaning to the already over-burdened title.

(Corinne’s prior villain lover was named Kyle, which might indicate that women should beware of men with terse, one syllable names.) Erin knew all along that Garth was married, but she didn’t seem to realize just how married.

After he leaves, Erin goes to San Diego to unearth Corinne and confront her: “Then Erin can welcome Corinne back, recognize that what she’s missing is Corinne, not answers.”

Furious, passionate and bitter, Mazza’s sixth novel represents a further development of motifs that have surfaced in the previous five: alienation, physical abuse, emotional torment, and the suffering inflicted upon the weak (mostly women) by the strong (mostly not). There is tremendous intensity here, but too flimsy a structure to contain all that rage.

Despite the attempt to create two distinct voices, all we hear is the plaintive wail of one hard-luck kid telling us that Kyle was a monster and Garth not much better.