Life with Daughter

CRESS DELAHANTY (311 pp.) -- Jessamyn West--Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

The first big-name novel of the new year shapes up as a bookstore hit and a literary hit or miss. In Cress Delahanty, Jessamyn West (The Friendly Persuasion, The Witch Diggers) camps on a familiar theme, the growing pains of a lively, sometimes lonely adolescent. A Book-of-the-Month Club choice for January, Cress is episodic in form, and never takes a deep enough drag on its subject to give anyone a sharp sense of reality, but as a kind of filter-tipped "Life with Daughter," it makes engaging light reading.

Big-boned, twelve and tenderhearted, Crescent Delahanty lives on a Southern California ranch, but spends her finest hours with King Arthur and Shelley. "The day dies, its burnished wrack burns in yon western sky," she tells herself as she watches a sunset. But Cress never writes this sort of thing in her notebooks ("The Poems of Crescent Delahanty, Volume III"); there she strives for something starker and more modern, e.g., "You do not have to wipe the noses of your dreams."

Dabbing at her own nose occasionally as she turns 13--because her classmates have thus far failed to single her out for admiring attention--Cress resolves to be a "character." Her trademark, she decides, will be Craziness, and pretty soon long-suffering Pa & Ma Delahanty begin to find around the house lists of premeditated behavior, e.g., "Useful Gags for Craziness. I. Clothes, A. Shoes, 1. Unmatched." One of her projects is to wait until she gets on the school bus before putting on her shoes. This gets her a squib in the school paper and passing fame as the author of "Delahanty's Law." But her gags have a way of backfiring; people laugh, but not necessarily in admiration.

Like a fresh tennis ball, Cress loses a little fuzz after each encounter with life, but goes on bouncing through another dozen escapades, all readable, if predictable. There is the schoolgirl crush on her piano teacher, a puppy-love phase with the spindly, spectacled whiz of the Latin class, the first cigarettes, first house parties, first pimples.

At novel's end, Cress's folks call her back from college to be at her dying grandfather's bedside. In a scene less solid than symbolic, Cress, now 16, gets her diploma from girlhood, and finally meets, in the fact of her grandfather's death, a reality larger than herself.

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