BOOK REVIEW : Voice of Holden Caulfield Looms Large : NOT THE END OF THE WORLD<i> By Rebecca Stowe</i> Pantheon $18; 152 pages

Once in a dozen blue moons a fictional personage comes along who remains unforgettable, not so much by character or action as by voice.

So distinctive is this voice that it turns into a perduring character itself; and by that fact, it is impossible to borrow. Except as deliberate pastiche, we’d find it hard to accept another figure with the intonations of Mr. Micawber, Mr. Dooley, Bertie Wooster, Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield.

Rebecca Stowe has gone back not quite as far as “Catcher in the Rye”--early 1960s instead of ‘50s--to create another sorrowfully combative young narrator. Maggie Pittsfield is not, in fact, a Caulfield clone. She is 12 instead of in the mid-teens. Being younger, and as a girl back in those days, she has less strength and mobility; less freedom to transform pain into flight. Furthermore, her pain is more grievous and specific. As an infant, she suffered a single, horrifying act of family abuse.

Stowe, in other words, has a different story to tell; one that, when it is able to show itself, has a particular if narrower ability to move us. But she has not trusted herself to devise her own voice for it.

Maggie--gifted, spirited, funny, and drawn fluttering into the flame of her infant nightmare--speaks in rhythms and intonations that keep summoning up Holden. She speaks from similarly alternate vantages of concealment and attack, and with a similarly mixed self-image as family victim and family redeemer.

Maggie comes at us at once, sizzling on her family perch in the affluent lakeside town of Port Huron, Mich. Seemingly it is a happy family. Maggie insists that it is, and then suddenly breaks into recriminations. True, there is a mean visiting grandmother, who puts everyone down, bullies her daughter--Maggie’s mother--and keeps up a drum beat of near-hysterical criticism of Maggie herself.

The reader, of course, is made rather too instantly aware of the dysfunctioning. Maggie’s mother is alternately solicitous and critical, enveloping and distant, and pathologically afraid of confrontations. Her father, a prosperous candy maker, is unfailingly bland and cheerful, but disappears into his den to play with his toy soldiers. Her older brother is kind but uninvolved; her little sister, Ruth, is convinced she is a bird.

Still, Maggie insists--for part of the time--it is a happy family and she loves them. The opposite, of course, is clearly the case. Too clear; Stowe’s strokes are crude ones. Even allowing for a child’s myth-making exaggerations, the adult portraits are cartoonish.

Maggie’s narration oscillates feverishly among gallows humor, wistful speculation, rage and self-hatred. She will look at her family, “wishing the bomb would drop right then and blow them all to bits, send them flying through the air like popcorn bursting from the pan.” A moment later, she berates herself as evil and a troublemaker.

She imagines hanging herself from the dining room chandelier and dangling while her family placidly goes on with dinner underneath. She imagines herself as different characters in the same body: An evil Margaret, a sunny clown, Twixie, a whiny Sarah, and a baby, Peggy, who is nothing but two eyes peering down from a bureau drawer.

Her story is set during the summer of her 13th year. She is attending summer classes as punishment for what she calls “the trouble at school.” It has ostracized her from her friends and obliged her to see a guidance counselor once a week. For most of the book, we are not told--the withholding seems rather artificial--what the trouble was. Eventually we learn that she had accused a male teacher of pushing her and bruising her arm; she had felt a sexual threat. Although the teacher’s account is upheld by the school, he is eventually transferred.

Maggie, however, feels like a pariah, and we don’t clearly see why. Her account of the incident is blurry and edged with hysteria, and we sense there is something else. Finally, the child recalls the real horror--abuse by an abused parent--and briefly breaks down. Her recollection is not complete, but perhaps it will shed enough of her burden so that she will be able to function in the boarding school to which she is to be sent.

Stowe succeeds very well in suggesting the sickness of a lingering, long-unacknowledged horror. We have no doubt that Maggie’s wild swings, her oscillating clamor, are a result. But this is a schematic truth. Her suffering is real enough. She and her family rarely are. Her voice--a child’s only authentic possession--only occasionally seems to belong to her. Holden Caulfield is in the way. The hands are Esau’s, as blind Isaac told his tricky son, but the voice is the voice of Jacob.

Next: Chris Goodrich reviews “Scar Lover” by Harry Crews (Poseidon).