A young woman adrift, at the mercy of luck, love, and fate

Rivers are major players in American mythology. Mississippi, Missouri, Hudson, Cuyahoga, Colorado, Rio Grande - their names invoke an endless cycle of discovery and diaspora, renewal and decay. "Follow Me," Joanna Scott's ambitious but disjointed new novel, sets a feckless young woman adrift on a fictional current, that of the Tuskee, and charts her adventures and mishaps as she attempts to escape the consequences of a disastrous adolescent encounter.

At 16, Sally Werner is a seventh-grade dropout with the work ethic of someone twice her age. It's 1947, and she's already been employed for four years at a neighbor's farm, doing housework and child care in exchange for room, board, and three pounds of sausages a week. These last she dutifully takes home each Sunday to her parents, Black Forest immigrants whose fear of anti-German sentiment has caused them to embrace a particularly unforgiving strain of Baptist fundamentalism.

So it's especially ironic that Sally gets pregnant after a church picnic, when she impulsively takes off on a motorcycle with her older cousin, Daniel. Besotted, Daniel begs her to marry him, cousin or no. Sally refuses, and instead courts her parents' rage until she gives birth to a son, whom she promptly abandons to their care. She sets out on her own, a child-woman who has "never been farther than the field behind the junkyard," and follows a stream that eventually becomes the Tuskee River, winding its way through Pennsylvania's industrial heartland.

Sally also quickly becomes someone new: Sally Angel, the rather twee name she adopts when she's taken in by a warmhearted family who employ her as housekeeper for their elderly uncle. But after several years she is outed at another church function - a wedding where her beautiful singing voice is recognized by a gossip from her former hometown, who blows the whistle on Sally's past. Despite this revelation, her kindly old employer gives Sally his life savings, and she heads to another town down river.

There she: finds work as a typist and falls in love with Martin Oliver Langerton, nicknamed Mole; survives the car accident that kills him; gets pregnant by another man, the despicable Benny Patterson; takes off on a bus to the city of Tuskee, where she becomes Sally Mole; gives birth to a daughter; and settles, very happily, for five years.

But her peaceful life is upended when the vengeful Benny reappears. Sally grabs her young daughter and again hits the road, fetching up in another city where she becomes Sally Bliss.

Sally's life is a farrago of incident and coincidence, disclosure and denial, as improbable and often as strained as her adopted names. Her tale is recounted through various voices, including those of her namesake granddaughter, and her granddaughter's father, Abe Boyle. The prose style wobbles between the lyrical and the stubbornly earthbound, and there are lovely flashes of magic realism that never resolve into a coherent vision. Sally's fate is inextricably linked to the river's meandering flow, and at key moments she encounters the Tuskawali, "river angels" - supernatural, salamander-like creatures that seem to exert a benign influence. The book is at its best when Scott gives these fabulist impulses free rein, and her novel takes on the dreamy shimmer of Eudora Welty's "Delta Wedding," or the gothic overtones of Charles Laughton's film adaptation of "The Night of the Hunter."

But Sally's aimlessness becomes grating as the tale proceeds, and the shifting points of view make it increasingly difficult to keep her character in focus. The resulting narrative is as evasive and slippery as the Tuskawali.

This seems to be Scott's point - that an individual's identity, like fate and the river that forms her novel's central metaphor, is fluid and defies our best efforts to control it. We're like Sally, "uselessly straightening a spiral notebook on the desk. Sally couldn't resist - it was in her nature to try to put the clutter of the world into some respectable order."

The novelist's task is to impose order upon the chaos of an invented life, to give voice to characters who, in the cluttered real world, often don't have their say. Yet the shifting voices in "Follow Me" grow discordant - that of Boyle is particularly annoying, a stream of consciousness that becomes a babbling torrent. And the chain of events caused by Sally's long-ago abandonment of her child (a rumored infanticide, possible sibling incest, a remarkable recovery from drowning) seems more melodramatic than tragic or miraculous.

Still, Scott is a nimble writer whose earlier books have won her much renown - her novel "The Manikin" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and she is the recipient of both Guggenheim and MacArthur grants. "Follow Me" is a heartfelt work that ends on a delicate grace note that suggests, for Sally's granddaughter, the possibility of happiness that the elder Sally never stopped pursuing. "Sweet, dazzling happiness - she couldn't resist it and would seize upon whatever happened to fall in her path, whatever by luck or chance made itself available."

Elizabeth Hand's 10th novel, "Wonderwall," about the poet Arthur Rimbaud, will be published this fall.