Teenage Werewolf

By John Skow

TITLE: BEFORE AND AFTER

AUTHOR: ROSELLEN BROWN

PUBLISHER: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 354 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: Yes, you do know where your son is: jail.

Until children can be flash-frozen at 12 and thawed out as college juniors, a technological advance that surely will start a new service industry, Rosellen Brown's plot can be counted on to grab a mother or father by the ventricles. Lying awake in sweaty sheets at 3 a.m., any parent of any teenager ! sees an immediate future more or less like Brown's melodrama: a 17-year-old New Hampshire boy named Jacob, no sulkier or more hostile than the next kid, suddenly goes septic and gets himself into hideous trouble. The cops, in fact, think he has bludgeoned his pregnant girlfriend to death with a car jack. It becomes clear to his parents (who knew nothing about the girlfriend) and younger sister that he is probably guilty, though when he is caught after several days, he refuses to say a word. The lawyer they hire isn't encouraging. Local peasants mutter and look sullen.

Brown, the respected author of Civil Wars and Tender Mercies, is a skilled and subtle observer. She pays careful, measured attention to the reactions of Carolyn, Jacob's mother, a pediatrician who believes that truth is too important for compromise; Ben, a talented sculptor who lies combatively for his son; and Judith, a bright, somewhat withdrawn girl who even before the crime was troubled by her brother's unruly sexuality. But too much care, too much measuring, give the novel a somewhat mechanical quality that prevents it from being first rate. Parents and sister are complex and believable, but seem chosen from a casting service for the way they balance one another -- she the idealistic scientist, he the passionate artist, the second child just the right age and sex to be most wounded. And the murder itself, though it could have happened, is kept at two or three removes of narration and never made to seem real and inevitable, something that might have occurred between two anguished people.

Jacob, unlike his parents and sister, rarely appears as more than a sketched figure. He seems not to have a life, but merely a function: to set off the family torment, so the author can take notes. Carolyn dutifully worries now and then about how the parents of the dead girl are feeling, but mostly the troubled family's misery is airless. The legal and psychological entanglement seems oddly phantasmagorical, lacking independent reality. As an expression of parental dread, of being trapped and unable to help one's children in a situation of vaguely defined horror, the fears are vivid enough. But they are a product of the 3 a.m. sweats, and in Before and After, the author never really breaks them free into the waking world.