A World Gone Wrong Feels So Right

THE BIG GIRLS

By Susanna Moore

Knopf. 224 pp. $24

Women are the wild cards in the ongoing card game of the human race. We bother men. We drive them nuts. We giggle at the wrong time. We don't pay attention. We pay too much attention. We hold a grudge. Or we forgive too easily. We're supposed to be the ones who make men behave badly. Thus, if a man bashes a woman, it's more than likely a crime of passion. But if a woman kills someone, she must be truly monstrous. And if a woman kills her own children, lock that female up and throw away the key.

But where do those women go -- after they get locked up and someone throws away the key? Susanna Moore creates one horrifying version of that world for us in "The Big Girls," a hypnotizing, oddly somnolent, intensely freaky novel. Sloatsburg Correctional Institution -- seven horrid stone buildings "on the west bank of the Hudson River, an hour north of Manhattan by train" -- is a hell for women, a ghastly netherworld of punishment. (Moore is a genius at creating alternate universes. Her previous novel, "One Last Look," gave us Calcutta in the year 1836, a place that seduced and debauched naive colonialists who thought they were coming to rule but either died or lost their dignity -- their whole rational idea of themselves destroyed in drugs, spices, unfathomable disorder, lawless sex.)

At first glance, Sloatsburg doesn't seem much like Calcutta, but the places have some things in common: Sex is sinful, painful, disgraceful, ubiquitous. Hallucinations are plentiful (from fever in India, from childhood trauma in the prison). Violence is everywhere. But both places are also overwhelmingly seductive, disgustingly mesmerizing. Once you experience them, every breath of fresh air anywhere else seems bogus.

Moore tells her prison story from four points of view. There's Louise Forrest, an attractive psychiatrist who for unexplained reasons has decided to work in this awful place, despite the fact that she's a single mother who must make the commute back to the city each night to be with Ransom, her creepy 8-year-old boy.

There's Helen, an inmate who was abused in childhood by her stepfather, whom she calls "Uncle Dad." She's done away with her own children to keep them from the rigors of this dreadful world. "Did I mother my kids?" she asks Forrest, "Did I murder them?" Helen's grasp on reality is hazy at best. Her imaginary friend Ellen has committed her crimes, and if that weren't enough, she's visited often by Avenging Messengers who crash through walls. Her one overwhelming wish is to kill herself but, of course, everything in this environment is set up to keep her from doing that.

Two other characters, marginally sensible ones, inhabit these pages. One is Angie, an up-and-coming starlet out on the West Coast who needs to parlay her career into genuine star status. She lives, by coincidence, with Forrest's ex-husband. Angie is self-centered, hedonistic, practical, a great user of drugs just to get through the day. The last is Ike Bradshaw, a corrections officer who's a smart enough man, but he's taken for an emotional ride by a couple of the characters mentioned above.

Helen, poor crazy little woman, sees a picture of Angie in a movie magazine and writes to her as a sister, which just adds another level of psychosis to everything else she has to deal with. Ike takes a liking to Forrest, but he forgets to take into account the ruthlessness of Ransom, her little boy. The trouble is, humans are sexual beings, and when cornered, they'll do anything to protect their emotional and sexual love objects. That truth applies here to everyone -- from the odious Uncle Dad to smarmy little Ransom, to all the throngs of suffering, desperate women in the lockup. Helen -- in between spells of craziness -- sagely observes, "Many of the ladies here wouldn't be gay if they were at home. . . . Acting gay has saved their lives. Some of them were never loved before, by either man, woman, or child. It's a way to feel safe, despite all the fights. It's also a good way to make the time fly. I can see that."

To create a world in which an insane child-murderer sounds more sentient than anyone else, to make us believe utterly in that world and still want to keep on reading, is a remarkable feat. This novel is as horrible as it is great, and vice versa.

Sunday in Book World

• Michael Chabon joins "The Yiddish Policemen's Union."
• Margaret Drabble swims with "The Sea Lady."
• Clive James suffers from "Cultural Amnesia."
• Don DeLillo drops a "Falling Man."
• And many mysteries are solved.