DATE: Thursday, August 14, 1997             TAG: 9708140773

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER 

                                            LENGTH:   76 lines

UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT LEAVES READERS HUNGRY

THE TITLE OF Suzanne Matson's debut novel, ``The Hunger Moon,'' refers to February's moon: ``It did look starved up there, vapory and thin. Such a cold city.'' The title also refers to the emotional lives of the three women characters.

Each is hungry for the connections of family in the America of the 1990s, when families are disconnected. The two younger women hunger for a mother figure. The older woman hungers for daughters who can understand her.

Their hungers, however, seem doomed, partly because of differences in the women's temperments[sic], and partly because of time constraints. The women know each other only for about two months, not long enough or well enough to develop innuendos in their relationships.

The action occurs in two movements - the first is page-turning; the second is disappointingly slow. The overall effect suggests a novella with a longish epilogue.

The story opens as Renata, a 27-year-old single mother of an infant son, approaches Brookline, Mass. She left her boyfriend in California before he knew she was pregnant. Her motivation for leaving is never exactly clear, but she has evidently been scarred because her parents were alcoholics. Renata decides to bring up her baby on her own and gives the father no chance to prove his fatherly instincts.

June, another central character, is a college student and an aspiring dancer. Her father has abandoned her mother for a younger woman who is now pregnant. This time, he somewhat callously assures his daughter, he will do it right. How he has ``done it wrong'' isn't explained, but the effect is seen in June's bulimia.

The third character, Eleanor, is a 78-year-old widow and mother of three children. Since Eleanor chose to combine a career as a lawyer with marriage and motherhood, her children were raised mostly by nannies. Now adults, those children feel they have been shortchanged. Mother and offspring are constantly sniping at each other. Eleanor's increasing confusion makes the relationship even more tense.

Matson writes alternating chapters from the perspective of each of the three women. This technique generates suspense, since readers know the characters only as well as each knows herself. They do not know how sick Eleanor is, how bulimic June is, and how right or wrong Renata is.

The writing is generally smooth, with some sections reading like a poem. Matson describes women especially well. Here she is on childbirth: ``She remembered labor to be like riding ocean waves with your body . . . ''

The story comes together when the three women meet. Eleanor, who is no longer able to drive, decides she needs someone to run errands and to clean her apartment. She contacts a cleaning service, and June responds. Renata, meanwhile, rents an apartment in the building where Eleanor lives. She meets the other two women, and hires June to watch her son so she can work as a waitress.

Tension mounts when Eleanor watches Renata's baby and becomes confused. Readers will wonder whether the elderly woman is merely remembering her past, or whether she is having a mini-stroke. All too soon, we learn the truth.

The last third of the story seems like an afterthought. Renata's boyfriend, Bryan, finds her, and they marry, partly due to June's intervention. June, after hemorrhaging internally, is cured of her eating disorder. But with the incidents in the novel so disjointed, the focus of the novel is fuzzy, like looking through binoculars that aren't adjusted.

Is this the story of the relationship among three women, as it seems most of the way through the book? Or is this the story of Renata's romance with Bryan, as the concluding chapters suggest? The characters never quite decide. Nor does the reader. MEMO: Diane Scharper is a poet who teaches memoir writing at Towson

State University in Towson, Md. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``The Hunger Moon''

Author: Suzanne Matson

Publisher: W.W. Norton. 252 pp.

Price: $23

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