PERFIDIA.<i> By Judith Rossner</i> .<i> Doubleday: 308 pp., $23.95</i>

In Judith Rossner’s chilling new novel, “Perfidia,” Maddy, a bright high school senior bound for the Ivy League, murders her mother in an uncontrollable fit of rage. As in her best-selling “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” Rossner drew this story from the nightly news, in this case, the account of a woman whose admission to college was rescinded after her matricide was discovered.

But Rossner’s Maddy goes nowhere near Harvard or any other university. Maddy has the brains. But the twin demons of class and neglect exclude her from the education that, by merit and aptitude, she deserves. Maddy invites our sympathy, in part because, from the start, she excels: “I was the smartest kid in the first grade.” Yet “Perfidia” is not a novel of character but of ideas. Its subject is that most insidious and widespread of abuses: the psychological.

Rossner sets her story in lively Santa Fe, N.M. Maddy’s mother, Anita, hits town with her 5-year-old. In the Pink Adobe, the first restaurant they enter (in the novel’s first paragraph, no less), she picks up a character named Wilkie. Two hours later, Anita gets pregnant.

Bright, enterprising and outrageous, Anita soon masterminds Santa Fe’s first gallery-mall. She is also alcoholic, amoral, sloppy, vengeful and ruthless. Worse, she is seductively kind to her daughter one moment and sadistically cold the next. As soon as brother Billy is born, Anita withdraws all affection from Maddy, a perfidy reflected in the title and a reference to a trashy, sentimental song to which Anita is addicted.

While Anita and “Belly,” her baby, are inseparable, Maddy is left behind, unless she is needed as a baby sitter. One minute her mother notices her; the next she becomes invisible again. Anita cavorts with one man after another, fueled by alcohol and plentiful drugs, while Maddy becomes increasingly isolated, bewildered and lonely: “I could have been crying for the remainder of my childhood,” she says.

Rossner’s novelistic risk is to have the story told by Maddy, a character numbed by pain and a stranger to her deepest feelings. Suppressing the murderous rage she feels toward her cruel and betraying mother and the terrifying knowledge that her mother hates her and wishes her dead, Maddy is capable only of half-truths and fragmentary insights. Unrelentingly, Rossner embroiders the novel with truths Maddy herself is incapable of fully comprehending, a condition that psychiatrist Leonard Shengold described in his 1989 landmark study, “Soul Murder.” In an attempt to annihilate the child’s ego, Shengold notes, the parent becomes an incubus dwelling within her, destroying the child’s fledgling identity.

“It’s as though her mind has come to nest in my brain,” Maddy realizes. Anita has had such a major role in crippling her child that Maddy doesn’t feel alive when she is not present: “It was as though I’d been dropped in a place with no sun.” Rossner reveals a truth that goes beyond the character of Maddy: Psychological abuse amounts to a form of murder.

“Perfidia” achieves its most poignant moments as Maddy, not knowing why, perceives that her mother’s influence controls her relationships with other people: “Her intensity, happy or unhappy, spoiled me for other humans.” Devoid of an identity of her own, Maddy is at the mercy of her deepest enemy.

Maddy speaks without affect. Some sentences are awkward and reflect her own bewilderment: “I knew she liked to hurt me when she was mad, but she’d never done it before without even being mad at me.” Some sentences make no apparent sense: “If I couldn’t get away from her by killing her, how . . . do they think they would have gotten her out of me alive?” Rossner forces the reader to stumble in the tangled morass of Maddy’s confusion. The language is stark, bare as the New Mexico desert, colored brown rather than green, a shade for which Maddy longs. The reader has no choice but to turn investigator and penetrate Maddy’s rationalizations and justifications of the unjustifiable.

As it explores the consequences of a psychological abuse that becomes physical as well, “Perfidia” gains power as a speculative novel. Implicit in “Perfidia” is Rossner’s attempt to dramatize an idea: Psychological abuse is as devastating and destructive as sexual or physical violations, and its consequences may be even more profound and life-engulfing. Meanwhile, the narrator is neither cozy nor confessional. Tough on herself, having internalized her mother’s rejection, she refuses the reader the easy satisfaction of pitying her because she rarely pities herself. Only occasionally does she give in: “I was used to being treated like some animal my own mother put in a kennel when she needed to go someplace.”

Rossner is after a larger response than having the reader simply identify with a victimized character. Her object is to chart the psychological wreckage of such abuse. The inevitability of cause reaping effect, so devalued by postmodernists who insist upon a structure of randomness, has been restored in this novel to its inevitable place. Rossner tips us off by having Anita explicitly reject the very notion. When her boyfriend Ellery, albeit an ineffectual, emotionally parched and self-protecting psychiatrist, “tried to explain how something she’d done had caused something else . . . she couldn’t accept this.”

Anita’s willful blindness notwithstanding, the psychic effects of Maddy’s having been abused appear in startling clarity as she describes herself. “I don’t listen to music,” Maddy admits. Shutting out the sounds of her mother’s tirades has been converted into a lifelong disability. She confesses to lacking curiosity. Concealing from herself the truth of her mother’s malice, she reveals that “the rule of my life has been not to tell anybody anything.” She cannot imagine having children of her own: “I don’t want a son or a daughter.” And of course school, her sole refuge, becomes her “favorite place.”

In a grotesque twist, Anita accuses Maddy of murdering her lover, Lion, who actually died of an overdose. Murder becomes part of the landscape of Maddy’s life and a viable option, as suicide sometimes becomes an option for children of suicide victims. There is no redemption possible when the damage is so great.

The vise tightens. After a violent episode, Maddy wets her pants. Anita’s inconsistency causes her to lose her bearings: “I’d been thrown back into my dream world, where people weren’t who you thought they were and you didn’t know why they did anything.” Rossner insists that it’s knowing the why, the reasons behind individual behavior, that helps get us through life. Maddy begins to think of herself in the third person. In a story so steeped in psychology (as if Rossner’s earlier novel, “August”), the author wisely keeps the description of dreams to one sentence. Reality is more harrowing, and dreams provide relief for the character, for the reader they interrupt the narrative.

The murder, which is not premeditated, begins as self-defense. Drunk, Anita goes at Maddy with a jagged broken bottle, “screaming at me that I was a s--- and she was going to flush me down the toilet.” But when Maddy defends herself and strikes back, it is with the “crazy rage” of a lifetime of anger. As Maddy realizes, “it wasn’t self-defense. . . . I felt the life draining out of her, it didn’t matter.” In an overwhelming page-long paragraph, Anita reaps the fruit of her abuse, and Maddy’s life is destroyed. It is a powerful piece of writing, and it leaves the reader’s mouth dry, even though the novel was moving inexorably toward this moment all along. After the murder, Maddy discovers that she has not been freed from Anita’s stranglehold. This is the most bloodcurdling truth of all.

Out of prison, Maddy clings to the illusion that her mother was not “purely my enemy.” Still in thrall of Anita, she continues to believe that women can love only sons, never daughters. As did her mother, she becomes carelessly pregnant. In pathetic terms, she reveals the one lesson she, as a deluded character, has learned. Penniless and alone as she is, she vows not to become a murderer twice; there will be no abortion.

“Nothing works,” Maddy concludes. She remains locked in her trauma. With uncompromising accuracy, Rossner has penetrated Maddy’s secrets. “Perfidia,” a painfully disquieting book, transcends Maddy’s confusion to lay bare, without didacticism, the horrifying and deforming legacy of psychological abuse. It’s a tour de force.