While I Was Gone.

While I Was Gone, A Novel By Sue Miller. Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 266 pp.

Ever since Victorian novelists made realistic fiction into a serious form for the study of imagined lives and their likely patterns, novelists who dip for ingredients into the richer, older stock of fairy-tale storytelling run the risk of seeming sensational, improbable, and even untrue. Having made a career writing realistic fiction about women's lives, Sue Miller in her latest novel bursts through the confines of those stories in which we know what will happen next, rupturing the ordinary, everyday world of her narrator Jo Becker with a set of sensational memories of a time when she lived a radically different life under an assumed name.

Miller works hard in While I Was Gone to keep her fairy tale tethered to recognizable landmarks in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts: Boston-area readers will not be disappointed by her evocation of place, which has always been a strong suit in her work. But in While I Was Gone the moral fabulist shows through, as revelations, confessions, and discoveries about the past translate into wounds in the present. The idea that a nasty secret gains power when, exposed to the present, it gets a fresh crop of victims, belongs to the related genres of horror, gothic, and fairy tale. Realistic fiction ordinarily endorses remembering as a psychological necessity for healing to occur. While I Was Gone shows that knowing the truth may satisfy a reader's desire for a full story, but as far as the characters go, knowledge itself cannot heal the ruptures created by seeking it.

In While I Was Gone, a grown-up married woman, Jo Becker, meets a man (Eli) from a time long past. They shared a communal household broken up by the murder of one of the housemates. The memories of that time, and the questions that arise about their murdered friend Dana, provoke Jo to draw too close to Eli. She risks her good life of the present day: Will her marriage survive? This summary of While I Was Gone, because it sticks to the realistic details, omits the elements that make the story an original and compelling fiction. For this to come through, I give you the fairy-tale version, which Miller disguises in the clothes of realism.

Once upon a time there was a girl who deliberately disappeared. She left her parents and her first husband in the dark. She changed her name: she boldly named herself Felicia Stead, "Happiness Instead." Perhaps this was a mistake of hubris, suggesting that she could choose her fate. She found a room in a house full of fascinating people, none more intense and provocative than the lovely Dana, until Felicia's arrival the only woman in the household. Here Felicia Stead avoided some dangers at the cost of putting herself in the way of other hazards, as fairy-tale form dictates. She came home one day to her haven and found the beautiful Dana dead in a pool of blood.

An ordeal follows, then escape into a new life (a good life) and yet another identity formed as Jo Becker. Because the girl is in a fairy tale and is by now surely a woman, she sees that her third choice must be her true and best choice, and thus she happily lives, a veterinarian with her minister husband, until the day when Eli, a housemate from the time "while she was gone," shows up. In the realistic novel that seemingly surrounds the woman, this can only be called a coincidence, but those who have not lost sight of the fairy tale (or their Freud) will recognize the bogeyman, the revenant, the return of the repressed. In vain the reader calls out: don't go back into those woods with that man, for the story demands that she will, and the readers (bloodthirstily curious) will also want to know what really happened all those years ago.

The novel then tells the story of the murder and the investigation as Jo Becker pursues the unanswered questions during her flirtation with Eli. Sue Miller exposes the impulsive self inside Jo Becker, usually kept under control, a self that jeopardizes her marriage for the sake of answering old questions and reliving old traumas experienced as Felicia Stead. If readers have a hard time keeping track of all the versions of Jo Becker mentioned in this review, they should rest assured that Miller's character also ponders the problem of knowing who she is and what story line she ought to be living out. The temptation to recapture a plot-line in which anything is possible and nothing predictable arises from Jo Becker's identification with the dead Dana, a character she remakes in bedtime stories of "Miraculotta," a superheroic girl who can do anything she desires. Jo's recovered connection with Eli, who remembers both the murdered Dana and Jo under her alias "Felicia Stead," ironically drives Jo into two of the most conventional stories told by realistic novels, "adultery," and "seduction and betrayal."

Miller uses her character's appetite for variety to present a confrontation between the excitements of fairy tales and the comforts and discomforts of domestic realism: either way, Jo Becker cannot escape the conventional. Miller's unusual skill shows when she introduces in her murder story the ingredients of thrillers, detective fiction, and police procedurals, but then resolutely turns away from their plot lines and solutions in favor of a plainer and more ordinary- looking goal, depicting the character as she confronts her own frailties and her mortality. Miller is less interested in the psycho- killer and more interested in the regular characters' fascination with him. Unlike P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, who probe the psychology of their killers and misfits, Miller takes the encounter with evil as an opportunity to represent a crisis almost any reader can imagine experiencing: alienation from our present selves and lives. It is a rare person who feels no wonderment at the gap between our younger selves and the selves we have become. The challenge to our sense of continuity and wholeness can be discomforting to contemplate: In the novel the rift is worsened by Jo's identification with the dead Dana, a theme she explores through bedtime stories told to one of her daughters. The interwoven subplot about the just-barely-grown daughters who make their separate ways home during the story reminds the reader that any consequences of the mother's actions will be experienced differently, and no less formatively, by the young whose adult selves are just taking shape.

While I Was Gone suggests that remembering, even the kind that seeks truth, can be overpraised. Handling in plain style the material and incidents of a traumatic memory brought unexpectedly into view, Miller adds up the tax on human relationships that comes with absorption in the past. Miller's patient depiction of Jo's husband, Daniel, minister and comforter of the bereaved, sets Jo's heady sensation of desiring a story whose outcome is not yet known in its true context, her knowledge of her mortality: "when we do know what will happen next. And next and next, and then last." The character most tormented by Jo's obsession with Dana and Eli, Daniel, offers in a eulogy a powerful definition of the proper place of remembering: After loss brings pain, which triggers memory, "itself a living metaphor for the eternal life," memory "rises within each of us by the grace of God." By contrast, the transcendent goal of this kind of memory makes Jo's obsession with the past seem damaging, circling as it does around the goal of laying blame.

Suzanne Keen, a frequent contributor, teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.