BOOK REVIEW : Growing Up Between Two Made-Up Minds : EVEN NOW <i> by Michelle Latiolais</i> Farrar, Straus and Giroux $18.95, 185 pages

Even on the point of a pin, angels need a little wing-room. “Even Now� is a sample of angelic writing--endowed, exquisite, lofty and disembodied--crowding into a constricted fiction.

Michelle Latiolais’ story bears both the mark of a first novel--the intimate record, with a seemingly autobiographical tinge, of a tormented adolescent’s struggle to save herself--and those of a highly practiced and schooled literary sensibility. Imagine an old Yeats writing as a young Keats, or the Wizard of Oz traveling the Yellow Brick Road to seek out Dorothy.

At 16, Lisa Sandham has for years been the victim, loved and abused, of the warfare between two sophisticated and despicably self-centered parents. Neville Sandham is a prosperous private pilot; Elisabeth, a musician.

Six years earlier, Lisa had been taken before a judge to say which parent she wanted to live with. She couldn’t answer, but her non-answer was taken by the judge for a choice. She had been living with her mother, and, she said, out of both loyalty and truth, that she liked it.

Her need, then and ever since, was to be loyal to both. But her father makes her feel guilty for what he calls her rejection, and her mother makes her feel guilty for not being unconditionally on her side. Each parent tries to kill in Lisa the presence of the other; what is at risk is her own life.

Living with Elisabeth in the California wine country, and periodically visiting Neville south of San Francisco, Lisa is constrained by the need to please whomever she is with. Mostly, it is her mother, an artistic, highly verbal woman who exercises good taste like a scourge. Her father, less expressive, exercises his own deadliness: He has been the “loser.� Lisa thinks it is her fault and feels like a betrayer. The crisis, which more or less forms the action in the book, is the battle set off when her father asks her to spend her junior year in high school with him.

Most of the battle takes place inside Lisa. At the end, probably surviving but not by much, she makes her decision. Perhaps it is enough to say that, between spending a year with her father and staying with her mother, it is the choice through which she can exercise the most autonomy.

The book--with its poisoned visits, meals and conversations, and Lisa’s dreams, recollections and moody wanderings--essentially portrays her struggle to preserve an underground identity until it is strong enough to raise its head. No child should have to conduct such a struggle; Lisa is in danger.

She cultivates pain. Hungry, she will sometimes not eat. Suffering from bladder infections, she exacerbates them by holding her urine in and not drinking. These things “were marks of physical individuality, a physical independence caused by singular action and thus a type of freedom and autonomy which she cherished as the insignia of self-control and self-possession.�

Latiolais, head of the undergraduate writing program at UC Irvine, writes her way very deeply into Lisa. It is an acute and complex portrait of how a child can suffer and how an adolescent begins to pick her way out of the suffering. The author knows where each moment of concealment, retreat and deflection is sited; she charts the brief darting advances through the maquis.

None of the other characters amounts to much. Elisabeth and Neville exist, despite their nuances, to cause pain. David, Elisabeth’s sometime lover, is kind but blurry, a vaguely seen instrument of help. And here is the Yeats-Keats, or Wizard-Dorothy, problem.

Sophisticated and sometimes overwritten, “Even Now� lacks the wisdom of its maturity; a wisdom that would make the adults something more than the empowering and destructive agents of Lisa’s drama. On the other hand, its intensely single focus, characteristic of a first novel, seems to miss the rush of blood, the vital assertiveness that redeem an adolescent’s narrow glance. The focus is on a set of brilliantly observed symptoms and pains; the character is rich in hurt, but less rich in life. She is so old a child that she loses a child’s fresh power to claim us.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “An Inconvenient Woman� by Dominick Dunne .