ALL ABOUT EVE.

Colony Girl By Thomas Rayfiel Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23, 279 pp.

Thomas Rayfiel's second novel is built on some terrific concepts. Its heroine, Eve ("Just Eve. No last names in the Bible"), is a member of a small religious sect outside the little town of Arhat (sounds like Ararat?), Iowa. In addition to the usual sexual dilemmas confronting turn-of-the-century American teen-agers, Eve must contend with being the favorite of the sect's founder, Gordon. It is not clear, for most of the novel, whether his prickly preference for her company will make Eve an object of his own sexual desire, his heir apparent in the preaching department, an enabler of his recent bizarre fascination with satellite tv, or some combination of all of the above.

Rayfiel's coupling of Eve's religious beliefs (set, but constantly challenged) and her sexual beliefs (in formation) makes for an intriguing variation on the traditional coming-of-age story. Because Eve is also simultaneously in love with a beautiful young high-school boy, Joey, and his portly, widowed middle-aged father, Herbert, the ensuing couplings are often funny in a way that is tender rather than mocking or judgmental. Rayfiel also treats Eve's religious passions with both the respect and the irony they deserve, and there is a useful tension throughout the telling of her story, not just between Eve's body and her beliefs but between readers and their evolving responses to her.

Rayfiel has chosen Eve's fifteen-year-old voice to tell the story, a perfectly reasonable narrative decision, and one that has its charms: Because she is feisty and iconoclastic, the narrative is especially appealing when she's ranting or making some deadly accurate adolescent observation of adults. The story begins, though, in the cadences of an intelligent adult, not a teen-ager, and the conventional narrative voice (sometimes it's even a little bland) is often less interesting than the events it describes. Eve tends to explain obvious things at length, particularly her emotions, her existence as a girl, and the most familiar trials of being a teen-ager ("I banged into things. I didn't know where I was, where I began and ended, from one day to the next"). Her musings about males have a peculiar filtered effect, as if they've been strained through a tidy adult consciousness (she describes another girl as having "this really dumb expression, the kind guys like because it's this absolutely blank screen they can project whatever cheap fantasy they want onto"). When Rayfiel allows her a one-liner, her voice is far more interesting. For example, when she fantasizes marrying the widower and becoming stepmother to his muscled son, she says, "I could give him baths," and the lack of further explanation is a relief.

The story's early events-Eve's experiments with alcohol, her introduction to Joey and his father, her decision to work as a highway- crew flagman-unfold as perfectly possible realistic events. The Colony itself, home to a dozen families who are "technically...Tertiary Baptist," but more tellingly in thrall to Gordon, is described in simple, nonsensational, believable terms. The Colony is a response to America's ongoing swings between rigid order and rebelliousness in matters religious and social: Gordon was once an on-the-make San Francisco street preacher, Eve's mother a promiscuous hippie. Now they are key members of a religious community that promotes fidelity, modesty, and American values rendered here in symbols as familiar as cherry pie (the Fourth of July is an important Colony holiday). Traditional sex roles are mandated: Men go out into the world, women feed them. Eve is full of challenges, but she remains faithful to Gordon's leadership and to a fairly orthodox belief in the God Gordon so flamboyantly describes. Why Gordon is willing to allow Eve her experimentation, not just in sex roles but in sex itself, is one of the plot's good mysteries.

Gordon himself is a wonderfully vivid character, and one of this novel's strengths is Rayfiel's refusal to reduce him to a bad guy (though, Lord knows, he's bad enough). He pops Demerol, drinks Everclear, and is fond of horrifying the Colony's young women with pronouncements on the order of "Men will stick it anywhere." (One of the novel's disappointments is its characters' unvarying

vision of men as victims of their bodies' desires and women as superior, because they have the discipline to contain their longings, which in any case are more romantic.) Gordon is Eve's father figure, and her sexual awakening is as Electran as Joey and Herbert's rivalry is Oedipal. Gordon is a huckster on the level of P. T. Barnum, and his pronouncements-"Ain't no Bible in the Bible"-are worthy of the meanest televangelists. Eve, though, can see his longing for transcendence, and that insight makes her a rich, multilayered character. Her musings on prayer, on nature, and on female friendship are Zen-like in their simplicity.

The means by which the plot points of her story are resolved, however, tend toward the fantastic, or at least the melodramatic. It's hard to buy some of the story's early manipulations (that Herbert, for example, brings the fifteen-year-old to a local bar where, uncarded and apparently unremarked, she has him buy her a couple of beers), but it would be ridiculous to accept some of the later ones. Eve, such an interesting soul in the novel's early pages, functions as fantasy fulfiller by the end, when she performs a literal striptease and a literary transformation. Part of the difficulty is that she has never completely found her voice, but part of it may be, too, that she bears so many conceptual burdens. Her story's ending, at least as far as this novel takes it, is pretty pat, too pat for the promising and complicated ideas on which it is built. Like Eve, Colony Girl is full of spitfire and promise, but it is not fully formed. It is, however, an engaging read throughout, and it is certainly a harbinger of challenging fiction to come from Thomas Rayfiel.

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels, including Brain Fever (Doubleday).