01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, October 9, 2005

BY MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE
Special to The Journal

A WILD RIDE UP THE CUPBOARDS, by Ann Bauer. Scribner. 279 pages. $24.

Ann Bauer's debut novel takes us into the life of Rachel, a Minnesota mother of two young boys, one of whom, Edward, has a mysterious withdrawal from the world at age 4. Edward also has odd brown discolorations on his skin, which their doctor warns may be an early sign of a disease marked not only by brain dysfunction but also by horribly disfiguring tumors.

To complicate matters, Rachel is pregnant with her third child when she and her husband, Jack, a cop, embark on a desperate search for the source -- and cure -- for Edward's affliction, which resembles autism.

Although Edward's problems are the fulcrum of the plot, the story is told in a gentle, measured way, the unadorned prose weaving back and forth in time from Rachel's first electric meeting with Jack at a bar in the small Minnesota town where she is attending college, to their marriage, to the birth of the two boys.

Bauer's writing about the twisting paths of family life recalls the early work of Sue Miller and Ann Tyler. Rachel's story is absorbing; she is a young mother with rather conventional expectations for life and finds herself in an entirely different one, living under financial pressures, Jack's alcoholism, their anxieties over Edward's future, her budding writing career, and, finally, hard and real questions about the enduring power of love, both for her children and for her husband.

Rachel and Jack's quest for their child's recovery leads them down many paths. As is the case for many who are involved with someone with an indistinct but debilitating affliction, the medical community has little to offer, and frankly, little interest.

Left to find answers on their own, the couple treads an odd path that includes a neurologist, a tea made of marijuana, a school for "special" children. And because the strange tumor disease may be genetic, Rachel also delves into the history of her Uncle Mickey, the "odd" relative who may have committed suicide.

The press materials accompanying the book state that it is Bauer's "novelization of her experiences as a young mother," and I feared something confessional or perhaps a treatise on disability. But it's a novel in the best sense: there is no Lorenzo's Oil-type breakthrough cure found by tireless parents. In fact, not to give too much away, the resolution of Edward's problems is more literary than literal.

This is a family novel to be enjoyed, a fluently told story examining how the bonds of love and loyalty hold up -- or don't -- under the ordinary and extraordinary forces of life itself.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of the novel Somebody's Daughter, and teaches writing at Brown.