3-D Mother

By John Skow

Halfway through her powerfully affecting novel One True Thing (Random House; 289 pages; $22), Anna Quindlen pauses, swabs her forehead with a bandanna (so the wrung-out reader imagines) and sums up: "Our parents are never people to us, never, they're always character traits, Achilles' heels, dim nightmares, vocal tics, bad noses, hot tears, all handed down and us stuck with them."

These brooding half-truths are the night thoughts of Ellen Gulden, a brilliant, self-absorbed and slightly chilly young woman who goes home grudgingly from a promising magazine job in Manhattan to tend her dying mother. She's the only acceptable nurse. Her college-age brothers can't help much. Besides, her pampered father, a philandering literature professor on whose preening intellect she has modeled her own, has demanded that she come. Ellen, once the town prodigy, now awkwardly learns to change sheets and cook supper.

In the months of dwindling and retreat that follow, Ellen sees Kate, her mother, really for the first time, as more than a collection of recipes and home-decoration hints. The two women talk, read Anna Karenina together, make their adjustments with pain. These conversations are the core of the novel, and all the core it needs.

But, perhaps shouldering for space on the shelf, perhaps simply from inexperience -- Quindlen writes a New York Times column, but this is only her second novel -- she has given her story a cumbersome plot frame, involving a grand jury investigation of a mercy killing and a melodramatic double misunderstanding underlying an estrangement between Ellen and her father. This elaboration clutters the novel but does not spoil it. Nor does the sense that beyond its last page, Ellen still has a living parent whom she understands only as a collection of flawed character traits.