‘Irreconcilable Differences’ : SOLAR STORMS,<i> By Linda Hogan (Scribner: $22; 351 pp.)</i>

Long ago, human beings noticed that other creatures could do things they couldn’t. Greedy, people asked the bird for the power to fly and the mole for the power to tunnel underground. Not content with these gifts, the humans then demanded to live as freely as water, which undid them completely. “All of it was taken away from them,” writes Linda Hogan in her novel, “Solar Storms,” because “they had forgotten to ask to become human beings.”

Becoming human--or evolving from a lost soul knocking hungrily around the universe to a realized being with a place in the natural order--is the drama at the heart of this stunning book. The vehicles of transformation are stories--simple narratives passed from generation to generation to establish codes for harmonious living.

As the book opens, a young girl named Angel has just washed up at a place called Adam’s Rib, a remote finger of land between northern Minnesota and Canada shared by native people and European immigrants. It is 1972, and Angel has no story of her own beyond some baby pictures swiped from a Woolworth’s photo booth that she passes off as hers. The true evidence of her history is etched in her face, in scars left by an abusive mother whose cruelty condemned her to a life of foster homes and troubled drifting. By the time she lands in Adam’s Rib, though she’s only 17, she feels as if she has “already worn out all the possibilities” in life. But she has come, nevertheless, in search of a woman called Agnes Iron--her great-grandmother, according to court records--to learn the secrets of her past.

To Angel’s surprise, in a grubby street called Poison Road, in a little broken-down house inhabited by eccentrics, one elderly, one ancient, she finds a colorful, loving world far richer than her invented childhood. Immediately, she is someone here, and she is home. “I always called you the girl who would return,” says Dora-Rouge, the family matriarch, Agnes’ mother, whose eyes are “dark and radiantly clear,” despite her knotted hands and toothless gums. Together, Agnes and Dora-Rouge tell Angel about herself (“What happened to you started long ago. . .”) and about her schizophrenic mother Hannah (“a woman in the grip of ice”).

Further pieces of the puzzle come from Bush, Angel’s grandmother, another tough, independent woman who lives alone on her own island and who, years ago, tried to save Hannah from her demons. But moving between her grandmothers’ homes, Angel is exposed to far more than just family lore. She learns the ways of the native people--her people--for whom the human and natural worlds are one and for whom life is predicated on reverence and respect. She understands the power of emotion; she falls in love.

Angel and her grandmothers go on a journey together, ostensibly to help block dam building on northern tribal lands that are being flooded and destroyed by progress-minded whites. Like all political acts, theirs has personal aspects too. Angel, for example, hopes to find her mother, who is still living among a tribe known as “the Fat- Eaters.”

Indeed, like Louise Erdrich, with whom she has been compared, Hogan makes plenty of sharp observations about the wrongheadedness of white culture. But, like Erdrich’s work, Hogan’s is dazzling and heartbreaking because its vivid stories and characters make an eloquent case for the wisdom of a way of life that has been--and is still being--wiped out.

The ever-lively Dora-Rouge, with her useless legs and habit of consulting her dead husband for advice, is the powerhouse of the family. Her instincts and memories, not to mention her raucous humor, get them through territory not found on maps.

Angel, who enters Dora-Rouge’s universe as a stranger, is the ideal narrator to guide us through it. She is new to the silent purity of remote northern winters, the floating ice and noisy voices of spring. Landscape, wildlife, tribal ways--she observes all with such wonder and precision that their slow demise is all the more tragic.

Yet surprisingly, the book itself is far from bleak. In Hogan’s world, tragedy always offers opportunity, a chance to come together with others and find solace in community. “Although this world is painful,” says one of Angel’s relatives, “be glad you’re here with those who love you.”

As Angel discovers, being human is about recognizing such connections--to family, friends, nature, the whole of life--rather than lording it over the rest of creation. Perceive this unity, Angel learns at the novel’s conclusion, and you will know that “Something beautiful lives inside us . . . believe it. You will see.”