BODY SHARERS

A promising but narrow first novel evokes the disturbed atmosphere of a household in which a 14-year-old girl—a survivor of repeated sexual abuse—lives with a relative who's given to obsessive thoughts of sexual violence. When asked how many children she had, Camille's mother had always answered, ``One, and one's too many.'' The teenager is already emotionally and spiritually motherless, then, when her mother dies and she's dumped with relatives: Aunt Marge, who's interested in dog-breeding, not in mothering; and Uncle Scofield, who trains police dogs and is tormented by visions of a ghost-dog- -as well as by desire for Cam: Scofield is also the man who molested her in the bath when she was little. Worse, a flute teacher seduced Cam at age nine, invited other men to use her, photographed her for child pornography, and arranged an abortion when he eventually got her pregnant. Now, as a teenager, she has no firm sense of boundaries—sexual or metaphysical. She is haunted by longing for her mother's love—as well as by the ghost-children of her mother's many abortions—and willingly satisfies the sexual desires her presence stirs up in those around her. The sexual material here, though shocking, eventually grows tedious, but there's a generous scattering of insights: for a suspicious priest, sin is like an architect's drafting table, not ``so much something to forgive as it was something to lean his elbows on while he worked.'' Poetic prose often generates the appropriate aura, but—just as everyone's consciousness here is limited to sexual obsession— the graphic cataloguing of ``body sharing'' all but obliterates character development.