Halfborn Woman

At the beginning (and end) of Woodbrown's affecting, avowedly autobiographical debut, 15-year-old Arlen Nichols lies in a Tampa emergency room, having barely survived America's bicentennial year--and a decade of abuse at the hands of her mother. Like Judith Rossner's recent Perfidia, Arlen's first-person sickbed meditation tells the tale of an adolescent girl driven to desperation by her mother's alternating bouts of rage and indifference. As Arlen grows up, however, we see her gain some possibly life-saving independence from her mother's skewed vision of the world. Woodbrown deftly captures Arlen's double bind as the girl tries to please a volatile jailer while also making a painful effort to look at the world from both sides of a broken marriage. When Arlen turns her frustrated anger inward, it's hard not to feel disturbed for her sake. And yet Woodbrown reminds us repeatedly that the explanation for the abusive behavior of Arlen's mother lies in her own past as an abused child, and that Arlen's powerful imagination offers the only hope of breaking the vicious circle in future generations. (Mar.)