Charting a family's inner landscape

The First Desire
By Nancy Reisman
Pantheon, 304 pp., $24

Although she is absent for most of its chapters, the character of Goldie Cohen haunts ''The First Desire" like an unexorcised spirit. Her disappearance is the event that launches the novel. Her early struggles within the Cohen household evoke the claustrophobia, the ''miredness" of family life, which is pivotal to the book. And it is her first desire that gives the story its title. Goldie's first desire is to be with her mother. Her second is to be invisible. This, at least, she achieves.

In staking home and family as the objects of her scrutiny in this preternaturally sensitive first novel, Nancy Reisman has laid claim to a territory easily dismissed as banal. The Cohen household in Buffalo in the 1920s is unexceptional: middle-class, Jewish, commonplace. The five siblings -- Sadie, Goldie, Irving, Celia, and Jo -- are young adults. Celia is unstable; Sadie is married; Jo works in a lawyer's office; Irving helps their father, Abe, in the family jewelry store. All except Goldie -- who was born in the old country, Russia, and has earned her father's perpetual disappointment -- are first-generation Americans. Their mother died two years earlier, and Abe, an emotional locked door, has since been conducting a shameless affair with Lillian Schumacher, the sister of his best friend, Moshe. A little eccentricity, a little bad behavior, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Yet from such unremarkable straw it is possible to spin gold. Reisman's gift is to inhabit the characters whose inner landscapes propel this narrative with a sublime mental attunement. Through three of the women in particular -- Sadie, Goldie, and Lillian -- she enters states of comprehension so plausibly full that the reader is tempted to nod in recognition: Yes, that seems entirely right.

Goldie's disappearance is handled in what we discover to be typical Reisman fashion -- a concrete event veiled in uncertainty, nuance, and the likely impossibility of absolute knowledge. Did she disappear on Sunday, or was it Monday? Did she merely go shopping, or visit Niagara Falls, or has she been murdered? For the Cohen family members, this is a matter for greater or less concern. Irving is a little discomfited; Abe, initially furious that Goldie's domestic responsibilities are being neglected, declares an end and sits shivah. It somehow falls to Sadie to carry the complex burden of responsibility. But as she places ads in the newspaper and calls the police, in her mind a furious pendulum is swinging, between dead and how dare she.

Reisman is marvelous at pinpointing those mental riffs that play in our heads, often devolving from a single word or phrase. Like restless tongues probing aching molars, the searching intelligences of Sadie and Lillian return again and again to such clauses: ''Do you?" ''All fine here." Platitudes, clichs, echoes -- glosses on lives impossible to express.

In the long timeline of ''The First Desire" -- from the 1920s to 1950 -- few other events rock the Cohens and the Schumachers as seismically as Goldie's disappearance. Sadie gives birth to two daughters. Jo develops an attraction to a female colleague. Lillian's brother pressures her to give up her job and take care of their ailing mother, but she resists him. And history stirs the pot. Lillian's employer goes under during the Depression. Irving volunteers to fight in World War II and serves, insignificantly, in England. As life events go, this is a less than remarkable roster.

But, then, ''The First Desire" is studious in its avoidance of the histrionic. Reisman finds more than adequate richness in the internal perspective: the modulations of character in response to interaction; the incremental adjustments of age, of revelation about the course of one's own life; the discomfort, doubt, and self-questioning of the daily round. Her novel implies that dealing with one's parents and family, and proceeding through the seven ages, are drama enough.

Whether stifling or seductive, the idea of family fills these characters' imaginations like an obsession. Goldie flees Buffalo because of it, settling on the West Coast, where ''she can breathe." Jo and Celia, who will never generate their own family groups, look on from afar and understand their exile. Lillian craves marriage to Abe but at last comes to suspect that his refusal is an act of kindness, a recognition of ''something about what the center is and is not."

What the center is and is not is the essence of this measured, beautifully pitched novel. Flesh and blood, home and hearth, come to mean something different to each member of the family. The love that Lillian's mother dispenses is ''the color of bruises." Mothers -- dead, alive, benign or poisonous -- play a crucial role, and in parallel, the author attends to her characters and their isolation with a tender devotion.

Prize-winning short stories do not always herald an exceptional first novel, but in the case of Reisman, her award-winning collection ''House Fires" has now been eclipsed by a debut of luminous, distinctive quality. Comparisons will doubtless follow -- with Michael Cunningham or Julia Glass, for example -- but this is a writer quietly taking her own bold course, and to travel with her as she does is a joy.

Elsbeth Lindner is a writer and publisher who lives near New York City.