FICTION

MOTHER OF PEARL by Mary Morrissy (Scribner: $22; 281 pp.) The Irish are inexhaustible--here comes yet another gifted writer from that buoyantly tragic isle. Mary Morrissy has written a novel about marginal people, thwarted hopes and cruelly deformed love that fairly bursts with the juice of language and compassion for her characters. So that the tragedy, when it comes, is all the more devastating.

Irene Rivers’ parents abandon her when she gets tuberculosis. Her craving for family and stability leads her to stay in the Granitefield sanatorium even after her cure, to do sexual favors for the inmates, to marry the first decent man who comes along and, when he proves impotent, to steal somebody else’s baby.

The young couple who lose the child live, no less than Irene, in worlds of pathetic and destructive fantasy. The child, Pearl, returned to her parents by the police, has no immunity from the curse; fugitive memories of having lived somewhere else, as another girl, later contaminate her love for her own unborn baby: “I would wake from the dream of [that other girl’s] life and find little seams in the air as if the skin of a new world had been peeled back and then hurriedly sewn up again, leaving behind only the transparent incisions.”