The scheme queen

"BECAUSE a fire was in my head" is a line from "The Song of Wandering Aengus," a poem by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Happily, Lynn Stegner makes good on her borrowing in this portrait of an amoral, redheaded woman vagabond who cuts a swath of psychic destruction from the prairies of Canada to the beaches of Northern California.

Young, pert and dimply Kate Riley is a descendant of Irish immigrants who settled on the vast and comfortless plains of Saskatchewan. Ashamed of the catalog pages she has to layer beneath her coat to stay warm but proud of the ringlets her doting barber father fashions for her, Kate is an archetypal daddy's girl, much to her icy mother's disgust. After Kate's father dies in 1941, when Kate is 10, the grim battle between mother and daughter escalates as the young men of the hauntingly named village of Netherfield, including Kate's older brothers, go off to war. Starved for love and joy, Kate often falls ill, or claims to be so, hoping for at least a little succor. And so a pattern is drawn: Whenever love, or even merely lust, is threatened or lost, sickness and disorder ensue -- including feigned maladies and theatrical acts of self-injury.

Stegner has set the bar high by summoning Yeats, but she is used to such challenges. The author of four novels, including "Undertow" and "Fata Morgana," she is married to writer Page Stegner, and her father-in-law was Wallace Stegner (1909-93), winner of the National Book Award for "The Spectator Bird" and the Pulitzer Prize for "Angle of Repose." Wallace Stegner also founded the Stanford Creative Writing Program, the proving ground for Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry and Robert Stone. Lynn Stegner truly is part of this great and heretofore conspicuously male tradition, writing with the same intensity and paying the same high attention to language, land and vagaries of thought and feeling while telling compelling stories about complex and involving characters. A novel fully realized on every level, "Because a Fire Was in My Head" is a provocative literary work of weight and luster. A risky, intermittently melodramatic tale, it casts light both on the timeless mysteries of the human psyche and on the paradoxes of a notoriously contrary epoch, namely, post-World War II North America.