The Odyssey : THE SASKIAD.<i> By Brian Hall</i> .<i> Houghton Mifflin: 382 pp., $23.95</i>

The catcher in Holden Caulfield’s rye was a partly saving, partly troubling fantasy. Real, he would have been the monstrous child-beckoner of fiction (Goethe’s and Schubert’s “Erlkonig,� the ghost story “Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad�), and in the news the excessively charismatic, suspiciously affectionate teacher or scoutmaster.

The redoubtable and richly imagined 12-year-old heroine of Brian Hall’s novel, “The Saskiad,� has half a dozen catchers to help her sustain the rigors and bereavements of her life. One is horribly real.

On the cusp between childhood and adolescence, Saskia is the toiling mainstay of Lauren, her mother, on the broken-down remnants of a hippie commune in upstate New York. She gets up at dawn to milk Marilyn, the cow, takes care of four variously parented children--due bills from the days of free love--and worries about Lauren, who runs things with an alternately firm and heedless hand, smokes pot and sleeps with one of two leftover hippie lodgers.

In addition, Saskia must endure an oddball reputation at school and her own chubby, lumpy, frog belly-white, frizzy-haired looks. They will mature into near beauty, but this is no consolation at present. What is hardest is a scarifying pain: Her golden father, Thomas, walked out when she was 3 and communicates by sporadic postcard from different parts of the world.

Twelve is an awkward age, but it can also be the dawn of imagination’s empire. Saskia has discovered the magic of words and literature--before the book ends she will have discovered their limitations--and with them she conjures up her private sovereignty. Hence, the catchers.

A child making her escape in fantasy is no novelty, but Hall devises Saskia’s escape as a comic, touching and revelatory embroidering of reality. For imaginary companions, her reading has given her Odysseus, Marco Polo and the hero of C. S. Forester’s bouncy seafaring novels: Captain Horatio Hornblower. There is also the Danish astronomer and mystic, Tycho Brahe, but this fantasy, set on a distant planet, goes with a grimmer later time when Saskia’s defenses have begun to crumble.

In the bright early pages, the author stitches life and secret life exuberantly though sometimes roughly together. Saskia wakes before dawn in her cold, shabby room to imagine herself navigating with Odysseus and marking the constellations. Using first-rate materials, Hall allows her Richmond Lattimore’s translation. She goes to the barn to milk Marilyn. Each heavy chore lightened by the words she conceives it with--�she fires into the bucket a long sequence of pump-action double-barreled blasting�--she returns to the cold job of getting four children up, fed and ready for school.

Hornblower comes to the rescue; she thinks of her charges as the crew. When Mims demands her teddy bear, Saskia laments in narrative third person: “Good God, what the Admiralty sends her.� At breakfast, she “scrambles eggs for the crew and sets out Marilyn’s milk along with tots of fresh squeezed rum.�

One day at school, she finds a new girl and develops a blinding crush on her. Jane Singh--lyrically besotted Saskia understands it to be “Sing�--is her opposite: lean, tan, graceful, with lustrous black hair and an English accent from her time in England with her Indian family. Hall gives a funny and moving account of the misfit schoolchild latching on to the new arrival. Risking everything, Saskia auditions for the position of best friend with a dazzling burst of literary fantasies.

Miraculously it works; Jane’s literary schooling makes her receptive to Saskia and they become misfit buddies together. They adventure through the slave marts of Samarkand, encounter Mongol horsemen, compare their limited thoughts about sex. Saskia vastly envies Jane’s Latin; Jane shrugs it off. All she can remember is “Semper ubi sub ubi.� That’s how the pope’s addresses begin, Saskia ventures, dimly recollecting. I don’t think so,� Jane replies. “It means ‘always wear underwear.’ �

So much for the book’s first part, with fantasy winning, though precariously. Fantasy rules the second part as well, but it becomes more frenetic as the reader, though not yet Saskia, discerns the darkness beneath.

It begins with a postcard from the last catcher: Saskia’s dreamed-of, romanticized father. Thomas invites her to join him in Scandinavia, where he is about to join an ecology trek against the building of a dam in Lappland. She invites Jane along.

This second section, which deals with Thomas and the two girls, is a complex and ingenious--though considerably too long--counterpoint between Saskia’s voice, as the innocent narrator, and what the reader begins to discern. There are clues, though not giveaways, from the start. Saskia thinks of Scandinavia as Phaeacia, the island where Odysseus was washed ashore, richly received and tended by the young princess Nausicaa, who fell in love with him and whom he betrayed and abandoned.

Only later will the reader make a closer connection; at first Thomas is all glory, wisdom and goodness to the two girls whom he leads on a grueling trek up into Lappland. He tells stories of his heroic exploits as an ecology activist; at one point, he claims, he sank a Norwegian whaling vessel. He is a martial commander on the trek, forcing the girls almost beyond their endurance while charming them with affection and kindness. He imparts a worldview that is thrilling and also, we--but not Saskia--realize, unpleasantly autocratic.

Before long, Jane has fallen in love. Saskia, transferring her own feelings, casts her friend in the Nausicaa role. She, Saskia, is “the eely line between yang and yin,� she says, revealing far more to us than she knows herself. Her voice is so lyrical and compelling that for a moment we may be taken in by the golden hues with which she depicts the monstrous affair between the 13-year-old and the man near his 40s, and the childish efforts she herself makes, in the harmful innocence of her fantasizing, to encourage it.

In the last part, the precarious alchemy collapses and Saskia’s gold turns back to lead. They return home, and Thomas moves in with Saskia’s mother. Jane--Nausicaa losing Ulysses to Penelope--breaks down and is sent away to boarding school. Saskia begins her own difficult journey into unconsoled truth, impelled by a series of revelations about the terrible web of lies Thomas has devised about himself and his family.

If everything before has been Saskia’s romantically misjudged quest after illusions, the concluding section describes her painful and awkward quest after reality. She tries on various roles as a cool teenager, a juvenile delinquent, a seducer--her looks have caught up with her--and finds at the end that none of them fit.

Saskia’s absolutes have shrunk into conditionals; even Thomas, repulsive as he is, is not without pathos. Her fantasies, though seemingly innocent, have some genetic connection to his psychopathic deceits. Innocent, no doubt, and yet they have served to betray her friend. At the end she asks whether in all her stories she has been not the heroine, but the villain.

It is a humbling, melancholy conclusion, yet not a bad one. Saskia the bleak is as dear to us as Saskia the dream-spinner. She has pretty well cast off Odysseus, Marco Polo, Tycho and Hornblower; we, oddly or otherwise, miss them.