Into Thin Air

Toting road maps marked with favored routes, Lee often wanders along highway shoulders, a habit she fell into after her mother died of cancer and her father and his new wife locked this surly, seductive woman-child out of their hearts. At 17, she elopes from Philadelphia with Jim Archer, the blandest boy she knows. Their first night together, Lee is sure she'll ``never sleep with him lying so close beside her, staking so much claim.'' Mired in a stifling marriage, she has a daughter, whom she abandons at a Baltimore hospital in order to skip from state to state, fleeing her old life and searching for a new one. Her brittle shell finally cracks when a friend adopts an equally restless, frantically resentful four-year-old; Lee begins to search again, this time for the child she left behind. Leavitt ( Meeting Rozzy Halfway ) builds tension with a neatly contrapuntal narrative. Alternately viewing the world through Lee's eyes and through Jim's, she skillfully renders two realistically different accounts of an abortive relationship--one stark and unyielding, the other made more palatable by comforting lies. The melancholy story that ensues engages the reader with its essential truths, but remains largely superficial in that its unhappy endings are not only inevitable, but predictable. (Feb.)