ON THE ROAD

By John Skow

The moral of this funny and acerbic family novel is, Don't give your clever eight-year-old anything to write about. Do not twit, tease, appall, amuse, behave weirdly in the presence of, or otherwise give fertile novelistic material to, the sort of shrewd moppet who may someday find a publisher.

As will be clear to anyone, including this reviewer, who knew the author's family when she was a child, models for the fictional characters in Martha McPhee's novel, Bright Angel Time (Random House; 244 pages; $23), were found close to home. Her father, the writer John McPhee, who has written several books on geology, is detectable in lightest disguise as a professor of geology, and the author herself is surely the youngest of several daughters (three in the novel, four in real life), the bemused eight-year-old narrator, Kate.

In such cases, of course, the reader is honor bound to swallow hard and assume that every word has been made up. Invention gives Kate a pretty, childish mother, who falls in love (literally, as a result of repeated backward-flop trust exercises) with her therapist, a slightly sleazy charmer named Anton. What follows melds The Bobbsey Twins with On the Road. Mom drags the girls across the U.S. to meet her lover at Esalen, the California therapy spa, borrowing gas money from Kate, the sort of wise child who always has some. Then with Anton, his five children and a couple of hippy hitchhikers, they cross the country again in a large turquoise camper, all of them smoking pot and drinking wine, the kids practicing sarcasm, and everyone quarreling.

Kate is an especially well-drawn character, neither cute nor tragic, believable as eight. As the pilgrimage falls apart, she yearns for solidity: her father, if possible, or the Grand Canyon, to which he promised to take her, and where the name of a layer of rock, Bright Angel Shale, has caught her imagination. Eventually she gets there.

--By John Skow