PLACES TO LOOK FOR A MOTHER

As this impressive first novel movingly attests, when a mother can't protect or nurture her child, the child must learn how to protect and nurture herself. When young Lucy Taylor realizes that her mother, Miriam, is incapable of assuming her responsibilities, she begins to surmount her pain and develop resilience. A befuddled, ineffectual (and eventually ousted) father and a bewildered older sister, Jen, try to fill in the gaps, but Lucy can't help trying to find redeeming qualities in Miriam, a compulsive, obsessive and self-centered beauty always teetering on the edge of sanity. Part hippie, "be-bop slut" and thwarted Suzy Homemaker, Miriam constantly cries, "Please, why won't anyone help me?" and manipulates every man she encounters (and sleeps with), changing her ethnicity as easily as she changes households. Lucy and Jen manage to survive their mother's instability and thrive—but not without much heartache. As it wends its way from the late 1960s to the '80s, from Utah and California to Alaska, the novel charts Miriam's search for "identity" at the cost of her own children's needs. Stansbury's view of an unstable mother through a child's eyes makes for a compulsive page-turner, funny, sad, maddening, exalting and sometimes exhausting. The raw anger the narrative exudes ultimately yields to understanding, and rewards the reader with tantalizing insights as Lucy finally glimpses her mother "in bay windows... in lunchboxes... in bed... in books of food stamps... in her face... in airports... in gifts... in photographs... in migraines... in dreams...." Stansbury will be compared to Mona Simpson, and the comparison is apt, although Stansbury's work is both more hard-edged and more emotional, and can stand on its own as an absorbing narrative. (Mar.)