Big Time : WHAT IT TAKES TO GET TO VEGAS: A Novel; By Yxta Maya Murray; Grove Press; 308 pp., $24

Five miles east of downtown Los Angeles, in the shadow of the 710 Freeway, there’s a landscape littered with barred windows and boarded storefronts. It’s occupied by “a mess of hoboes, boxers, nine-to-fivers, nutso church ladies, trigger-happy-con-men, knock-kneed Catholic-schoolers, and a handful of sexy walking women.” This is Yxta Maya Murray’s L.A. Here, grown men, trapped in dead-end jobs as stock boys, bus boys and bell boys, dream nightly of breaking free. Their collective history is cluttered with stories of the precious few who made it out of this poverty through prize fighting. And so bus boys become boxers, their bodies sacrificed in an effort to save their souls.

There’s big money in boxing--Oscar De La Hoya, perhaps East L.A.’s most famous son, is expected to make $40 million this year. Rita Zapata, the narrator of “What It Takes to Get to Vegas,” Murray’s latest novel, believes that her future prosperity rests in the quick jabs and sharp lefts of a talented boxer; early on, she decides to find and wed a champ. “Beyond getting to bed down men made of one hundred percent pure muscle, Rita argues, boxers’ wives “also get bodyguards and three-story houses and bouncing babies and fox fur coats. . . .” Rita samples her way through the menu at Ruben’s Superbox, the local training gym, until she settles upon a certain rising star, dreaming all the while of the big time: pay-per-view, live via satellite from Las Vegas.

Rita and her sister, Dolores, were raised by their mother, Lola, who left Calexico 32 yearsago in search of a different Los Angeles from the one in which she now feels trapped. Lola believed that L.A., with “the hands and feet pressed in concrete, the ice-cream counters where you’re sure to be discovered,” would bring her fame and fortune. She did eventually find fame--as the Spanish Fly, a stripper at a downtown club--but failed to find fortune in any form. And so her daughters have had to live with the consequences of their mother’s choices. They walk the streets near Cesar Chavez Avenue in cheap shoes, terrorized by the thought of meeting “La Rica Hernandez,” the “Eva Peron wannabe . . . unofficial mayor of East L.A.,” who just happens to be the wife of their mother’s lover and delights in branding Lola and her daughters as “a family of man-stealing, VD-carrying trash.” They are booted out of church when they go to pay respects to Lola’s dead mother. And they are taunted by “las girlfriends,” the clique of girls to which they desperately want to belong.

There should be much to like about this novel. It offers a swift, compelling portrait of the East L.A. boxing scene and a woman’s place in it. (At a recent De La Hoya fight, more than half the audience was female.) Murray captures the perils of street fighting, the fierce regimen of training, the rapture of victory, the disgrace of the has-been and the shame felt by the mid-level boxer who takes a job with the World Wrestling Federation to pay his bills. Hope mingles with desperation, as the boys of the Superbox struggle against age and the limitations of their bodies: “A few years ago Martinez had stopped taking his shirt off when he fought. Now we knew why. His body had took some bad beatings, and it told the tale. The belly hung loose; scars cut up his shoulders and chest. Broke blood vessels stained up his ribs, and his muscles had shrunk. It was like pulling back the wings of a lamed hawk and seeing the thin cracked bones, the fragile heart thumping under the ripped feathers. . . . Everybody knew they were looking at their futures.”

Murray’s elegant prose beckons those who fear this land of urban blight to venture into it, to stay a while and meet its citizens: the nosy church lady, the down-and-out drunkard, the politicized young man, the single mother, the cheating husband, the bejeweled and befurred mistress. Though these characters, in this setting, might seem stereotypically Latino, they are men and women who populate any ethnic group. Collectively, in this story, they reveal more truths than they obfuscate.

But Murray betrays her characters in telling their stories, with a plot that is unimaginative and all too familiar. There is little here that surprises--or, more important, compels readers to follow Rita’s story through to resolution. We guess Rita’s future 100 pages before she does: We know she will make it to Vegas, but it will not be what she expected, just as we know that life with Billy, her prize fighter, will not be what she planned.

Rita monopolizes this book, providing little to love or even to learn from, and her conceit is off-putting. Dolores, the sister she alternately shuns and embraces, is a far more intriguing character. She tries to rise above her station in life by politicizing the women around her: forming a Latina League and a Neighborhood Watch, speaking out against drugs, lobbying the City Council for more police protection. Dolores “hated the gangs more than ever,” Rita tells us. “She said they were bad for the Chicano reputation. . . . She also said that Latinas should get ourselves self-reliance because we’d all been taught from day one to depend on a man for everything but those days were over and we needed to get in touch with our feminisms and our brown female power.”

But just as Dolores reaches the pinnacle of her activist career, her husband is slaughtered by the very police she called upon to protect her family. We desperately want to witness this remarkable turn of events, to understand the complexity of her emotional response to this horror and its riotous aftermath and wish for a narrative setup like the one Murray used in her first novel, “Locas,” which was told from the perspectives of two women. But Dolores’ silent dignity is lost in the din of Rita’s self-involvement, and we are left to imagine most of the human tragedy that must have unfolded.

In her dream of reaching Las Vegas, Rita envisions her life as a boxer’s wife: “I saw me in Vegas, . . so happy I looked like a stranger. I knew then that there was no choice. I would have to take it. . . . I had to take the good with the bad.” The reader of “What It Takes to Get to Vegas” is in rather the same predicament: having to take the good with the bad, stellar prose with unimaginative story lines, always yearning for more of the good. Murray has given us a glimpse of her talent, but she is capable of so much more.