It's a Jungle Out There

ORIGIN

By Diana Abu-Jaber

Norton. 384 pp. $24.95

At the beginning of this wonderful novel, 6-year-old Lena sits with Pia, her foster mother, watching an old Tarzan movie on television. "I sat, openmouthed," Lena remembers as an adult, "watching the man, the woman, the birds, the tiger, the leaves. And finally she was there, the one I'd waited for, had known would come eventually. I jumped up, crying, 'Mama! Mama!' " Lena's not pointing to Jane, but to an ape. Her foster mother is entirely creeped out. Without knowing how, or why, Lena has totally disgraced herself. After that, Pia and her husband never get around to adopting the lonely little girl.

Flash-forward perhaps 30 years. Lena still lives in Syracuse, N.Y. (where she grew up), and works now with the police department as a "fingerprint examiner and technician." She's one of those anonymous employees who work in fusty offices, in her case with three other women doing various kinds of scut work to put together cases for prosecution. Their lives are obscure, but Lena prefers it that way. "I basically like to be left alone and unfussed-with. I don't want to cook, go dancing, chase children, drive cars, plant flowers, do yoga, or any of the dozens of other things people advise me to do." She's good at fingerprints and examining evidence. She feels, fairly strongly, that she has come from an unknown world -- a rain forest, most likely. She leaves crumbs scattered around her desk from her brown-bag lunches and forgets to wash her hair for days at a time. And she has strong instincts and senses. A few years back she solved a case by using these skills. (Her police colleagues weren't exactly beside themselves with altruistic joy when she got this unexpected jolt of publicity.)

Lena was once married to Charlie, a policeman. After his fourth affair, they broke up -- with heartbreak on her part. But now that they're apart, he can't stop taking her to dinner once a week and lecturing her about her many shortcomings -- and reminding her that, after all, she's still his wife. He tends to get nowhere with all this blustering due to Lena's utter lack of energy. She's moved out of their house and into a drab furnished apartment in a bad part of town. She craves nothing but solitude, taking the bus (or walking) back and forth between work and "home," during a punishing, endless Syracuse winter.

Her somnolent calm is broken as she comes to work one morning. A hysterical woman has pushed past security; she accosts Lena. "My baby is -- he died five weeks ago. The police haven't done a single thing about it. Nothing." As guards try to pry the woman away, she continues: "You're the evidence specialist? You can find things. That's what I heard. You're better than the police." Lena's colleagues are far from impressed by the grieving mother's performance. For one thing, SIDS (crib death) is fairly common. And aside from a crazed parent, who'd want to go around killing babies? The mother is simply overwrought and that has to be the end of it. Lena's superior, Alyce, one of the women in the awful little room, warns Lena to stay out of it.

I'm not sure I've been able to imply just how much creepy fun "Origin" is to read. It's not every day you find a heroine who's convinced (with good reason) that she's been raised by apes. And it's rare indeed that weather plays a leading role in a narrative, but the author invokes cold and its awful dangers in a hundred horrifying ways. The roles of churlish ex-husband and unfeeling mother-figure have been done often enough, but Charlie, the burly, conniving, unrepentant self-deluding cop, is a joy to see in action, and Pia, the foster mother, acts stone-crazy because she is stone-crazy, poor little thing.

And what about those crib deaths, which finally add up to eight? Could there be a serial killer of babies wandering frozen Syracuse during this menacing winter? The cribs that accrue in the evidence room would seem to say that, indeed, a monster is roaming the streets.

Meanwhile, the four women, penned up in their little room, pick on each other. Alyce, older and purely awful, bosses and snoops. Margo, a single mother of two, is petulant and angry at everybody. Sylvie keeps her head down. Lena goes home to her joyless rooms. No one in the police department has either a literal or figurative clue about the baby deaths. A ghastly reporter begins to stalk Lena. And when Lena finally visits a crime scene, the toxic horror from the crib sends her reeling out of the house.

Lena's no hero. She's scared to death almost all the time and terribly depressed. People have been lying to her since her first conscious moment. There's probably something in her that powerfully wants to die. And someone is after her job, planting evidence that questions her competence. But she's determined to find out who's killed those babies, and why. The solutions to the myriad mysteries here are spookier and sadder than even the beginnings of the plot would have you believe. "Origin" is an original -- just wonderful to read.

Sunday in Book World

· Stephen L. Carter's "New England White."

· Guenter Grass reveals (almost) all.

· Carrie Brown's "The Rope Walk."

· Colin Thubron travels the Silk Road.

· And two books that rock.