A Walk With Zoe Cloud : Her motley collection of fellow travelers ends up simply being the world : GREEN, <i> By Frances Sherwood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22; 419 pp.)</i>

Frances Sherwood’s acclaimed first novel, “Vindication,” was a fictional biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, an energetic blast into the 18th-Century past. Now, in “Green,” Sherwood revs up her storytelling machine to blaze over another, and, it seems, equally remote, period of history: the 1950s. This time her heroine is a friendless, gawky Mormon-Armenian teen-ager growing up in Northern California. It’s a wonder we trust this girl at all, but right from the start, we’re on her side, relying on her narrative to navigate the waters of her wobbly, unpredictable life.

Zoe McLaren is a true innocent, with an innocent’s eye for observation. We learn the telling details of her early childhood--her Mormon father’s grim platitudinizing, her mother’s voluptuous alcoholism--and the torment they together put Zoe through. Living in Pacific Grove, in a paradise of identical tract homes, Zoe always feels the outsider, given her unspeakable home life and her unconventional looks--skinny, nearly six feet tall, with a mop of coily red hair.

Childhood scenes stick in Zoe’s mind like recurring nightmares: her boozy mother locking Zoe up with her in the closet and not letting her out even after she wets her pants (“ ‘Cozy as two bugs in a rug,’ my mother would slur, her nails talons in my side”); her father rousing her at 3 a.m. to scrub the kitchen as he spouts cliches about his wife’s drinking, a taboo in the Mormon church.

Each time her mother collapses on the living room floor, it’s Zoe’s job to scrape her up and put her to bed. When she herself expresses a need, like wanting to know something about sex and procreation, her father’s considered opinion is: “What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but bad posture is a sign of moral turpitude,” and “Curiosity killed the cat.” To which Zoe, in all honesty asks, “How?”

“Of my high school life, I can say these four words: I was not popular.” Her best and only friend was a fellow misfit, Margo Robinson, a brilliant black girl whose adoptive parents were socialist Jews. In turn, Zoe adopts the Robinsons, basking in their educated talk, their commitment to social change, their bohemian domestic arrangements. Of course, she never can tell her parents about Margo, “because my father thought Negroes were cursed by God” because they’re clearly not “white and delightsome” like the chosen Mormons.

Through a first almost surrealistically sleazy sexual encounter and then through her clandestine sexual relationship with Margo’s father, we begin to glimpse the underbelly of Zoe’s innocence, her misguided craving for love, her high tolerance for humiliation. Next she falls in love with Greylen Cloud, a half-Native American self-styled poet, who says, “If you ever leave me, I will kill you.” Sometimes he tries to kill her even when she’s not leaving.

As is often the case in abusive relationships, Zoe stays with Grey until he finally leaves her. Pregnant, she struggles to keep going, finding work in a sweatshop where she’s the only white woman. After her baby is born, she moves to San Francisco, rooming in the Zone, the black ghetto in the Filmore district (“It made sense. It was fated. Negroes were going to save my life.”)

Zoe’s name, a friend tells her, means life in Greek. And even though her family and lovers let her down, she grows like a persistent weed that pushes up through the sidewalk. She is always at work, conscientiously trying to make sense out of her decisions and the choices of those around her.

“Nothing is great about real, but it’s what we have to contend with; it’s the world; it’s our job.” Unsparing in her self-observation, she struggles to accept what she sees. The title, “Green,” refers not only to her gullibility and jealousy but also to her growth. She’s a brilliant girl, often pinioned by her own honesty, and it makes her always worth listening to.

In fact, one of the satisfactions of the book resides in the listening. Lively conversation abounds, and it’s a delight to read. The sheer talk of the novel forms a whole supra-layer of experience. Whether it’s Aaron Robinson brooding over political history or Lucille, the black boarding-house landlady offering advice, or Zoe’s Mormon great-aunt Mathilda clarifying her own iconoclasm, speech and ideas flow easily and with precision.

Zoe’s voice, of course, wins the day, a voice that’s been nourished on the rhythms of the Beat generation. You can hear it in Zoe’s jazzy playfulness with words (“As an object, that letter was precious, precocious and precarious to me.”) or in her brief verbal riffs:

“Or my heart. Strung up on the Utah clothesline to dry, clothespins pinching it, the sun drying it out, after being in the roller-wringer.

Or my heart. Caught like an old sock in the dryer of the Laundromat. . . .

Or my heart. Hanging by a thread from the big stand-up fan in the garment factory. . . .

Or my heart. Put in a drawer, the underclothes drawer beneath the underpants in my Pacific Grove girl’s room.”

Its verbal texture gives the novel an incantatory quality, which is reinforced by the pattern of images. Zoe is prone to portents: coyotes that represent Grey, dreams that turn out to be prescient. As in those little books that show an animated figure spring into action as you flip the pages, we see Zoe emerge and begin to take off. Withstanding loss and even tragedy, Zoe thoroughly earns her symbolic birth at the end of the book.

McCarthyism, racism, alcoholism, co-dependency, feminism--Sherwood isn’t writing about these issues; she’s deep inside them. Zoe is teased as “the little sufferjette” by one friend and asked by another, “What is it with you and minorities?” Sherwood isn’t disingenuous about Zoe’s life amid the underclass; she registers the incongruity and then shows the deeper congruity. The motley collection of fellow travelers that form Zoe’s world ends up simply being the world.

Fresh and intelligent, the book puts a fascinating spin on our notions of the American experience. Luckily, we have Zoe McLaren Cloud to talk us through it.