BABY’S BREATH

A vividly detailed but unpersuasive second novel tries to show why a college freshman denies her pregnancy and then abandons her newborn baby.

The writers' territory is that perimeter around A-student Alyssa, 19, and her middle-aged mother Leah, a successful painter, bristling with defense mechanisms and hurt-seeking missiles that surrounds the hearts of so many mothers and daughters in fiction. Leah has long been divorced from Dennis, a self-absorbed artist whose remarriage to a much younger woman has left money as his only link to his daughter, who lives with Leah in Philadelphia. Alyssa is bright and does well in school, but when Leah, who is nursing her dying mother, can't fly out with her when she leaves for her freshman year at Berkeley, Alyssa is deeply hurt. Seeing this abandonment as yet another example of her mother's insensitivity, and already pudgy, she keeps eating, loses her virginity to a campus stud, and then finds herself pregnant. Because the plot demands that she behave in moronic ways and keep mum with Mom, who is sweet and nice and really tries, Alyssa tells nobody. Instead, she moves out of her dorm, lives alone and, when labor starts, heads to a subway restroom, where she gives birth to a baby girl. Disoriented by shock and pain, Alyssa is rescued by a street woman, who gives her temporary shelter in a flophouse in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. But when the baby's body is found in a trashcan, Alyssa is arrested and thrown into the slammer without bail. It's not until Alyssa's trial for murder that she finally begins to draw closer to her distraught mother.

What should be a searing tragedy is instead another unconvincing take on mothers and daughters who love each other but are too dumb and defensive to open up until it's almost too late.