The searcher

Away
By Amy Bloom
Random House, 240 pp., $23.95

Lillian Leyb's American story begins on July 3, 1924, on New York's Lower East Side, a scene so vivid and engaging, so delicious in tone, that a reader experiences an immediate thrill, the all-too-rare one that signals: I am in excellent hands here.

Amy Bloom's fourth work of fiction, "Away," tells the story of a young widow who has escaped a pogrom in Turov, Russia, has "endured the murder of her family, the loss of her daughter . . . an ocean crossing like a death march, intimate life with strangers in her cousin Frieda's two rooms, smelling of men and urine and fried food and uncertainty and need."

The language that Bloom employs to tell Lillian's story is immediate, colorful, and unafraid to be plain: "Meyer Burstein has made his move. He gets a little apartment for himself and for Lillian on Second Avenue, a block from the theater. He has prepared what he'll say to his parents at dinner -- It's good to be able to stay the night after I do two shows; this way I don't disturb Ma when I come home late . . . and his mother looks at him and says, 'That makes sense, darling,' and his father, who knows the landlord, who knows the locksmith, who knows the number one importer of mattresses, box springs, and bed frames on the Lower East Side, and who has spoken to all of them on Meyer's behalf, nods as if resigned to his son's independence."

Back in Turov, "there were people who thought she had a way about her, but not here. In English, she is the ugly stepchild; people are not inspired to give her things; they don't even want her to be where they are looking." Lillian, we discover early in the book, the first time she stands in line, barely speaking English and hoping to sew costumes for the Goldfadn Theatre, "wants to see Opportunity." Pragmatism informs her every decision and every act. The owner of the Goldfadn and Bartelstone theaters, Reuben Burstein, "the Impresario of Second Avenue," and his son, the matinee idol Meyer, "are stars in the firmament of life, visitors from a brighter, more beautiful planet." They do hire Lillian from the crowd of would-be seamstresses and soon promote her to another station. May I hint that to the young widow, physically and emotionally scarred, virtue isn't figured into the calculus of despair and survival? She is, above all, "a very sensible girl" who needs to be something other than Frieda's tragic cousin, sharing a narrow bed in a crowded flat. When cousin Raisele arrives from the old country, suggesting that Lillian's beloved daughter, Sophie, may have survived, hope and courage propel Lillian on another journey.

One of the alleged commandments in fiction writing is "Show, don't tell," which makes it all the more wonderful to read a novel that breaks that rule so confidently and successfully. One year after arriving in New York, and after a stint as a maid to a prostitute named Gumdrop Brown, Lillian is on the Alaska Steamship Company's worst vessel, rooming with missionary sisters Mary and Martha Hornsmith. "They pray for Lillian because when she climbed into her hammock on the first night . . . Mary Hornsmith asked her forty-seven personal questions Lillian couldn't answer. (Yes, I had a child -- I think she may be dead but I am going to Siberia, just in case; yes, I was married and he is dead, too; yes, I come from a small town that was burned to the ground by Christians -- thank you for asking) and finally said that she was a prostitute from Seattle, on the lam from her pimp. She said her name was Gumdrop Brown and she led them to understand that she was tired of her life of sin, which had been spectacularly awful."

How much to divulge here? Lillian sets out for Siberia via the Yukon on foot. Delays and detours abound. Her journey, its patrons, and its population are the story, turning on surprises and episodic encounters. Much of the joy of this novel is in the unexpected and its moral ambiguities: Is Lillian good or bad? Is her daughter alive, dead, or findable? The will-she-or-won't-she crossroads are not limited to one man, one plot turn, or one predicament, but the entire minefield that is the novel's broad canvas.

This is a story in which tone is king. Every page offers witty characterizations delivered as deadpan briefings on the newest stranger, ally, or villain. "Arthur Gilpin is a good man and Prince Rupert's only constable, and his wife has been dead for nine months. He has lain by himself and cried into his dead wife's nightgown almost every one of those two hundred and seventy nights, except when he was too drunk to climb to his bed."

Throughout "Away" there is a narrative idiosyncrasy I grew to love: Out of time, place, and sequence in the story, Bloom supplies a crystal ball. As principals leave the story, we see into their futures. The real Gumdrop Brown, Seattle prostitute, "does surface in St. Paul, in a navy-blue suit and navy-blue suede pumps with ankle straps, and she does what she set out to do. She teaches at the best colored school, she meets a fine Jewish man, she converts under the eye of a wary rabbi . . . and she marries Morris Teighblum in the rabbi's study."

It's not easy to be lyrical, funny, and brilliant all at once, and Bloom is, with a serious bonus: We don't feel any authorial reach to imbue "Away" with those attributes. A marvelously sly observer of all things human, she has the confidence to write, "Red McGann smiles. It is not the worst smile she will ever see, but it has the kind of tenderness you find on the faces of boys who love their dogs and kick them." Plain, unostentatious words? They accrue on every page into artful and irresistible fiction.

Elinor Lipman is the author of eight novels, most recently "My Latest Grievance."