Rosellen Brown sets a difficult tale of a mother and daughter in racially charged sprawl of Houston

People who grew up knowing the place will tell you that Houston is nothing more than an old cotton and oil town that got too proud of itself. These days, it's a high-tack paradise of designer malls and cloverleafs, its atmospheric conditions dictated by sweltering heat and the smell of money.

The city has always been rife with irony: Yellow fever nearly took it down until people figured out how to kill mosquitoes, around the same time they discovered oil. Heading west during Reconstruction, a large black population settled in the center of Houston, near what would become the railroads and the Ship Channel; the white middle classes, poised for the promise of segregation by flight, responded by building ever outward. So the racial tensions of the city _ and they were legion _ were eased far more by sprawl than by accommodation. And the only thing black about all that lily-white money was the sludge from the petroleum industry that made it.

It's an excellent setting for a story of racial indignities and iniquities, in other words, and Rosellen Brown, who lived and taught in Houston for years, has made the place a cat's cradle of nuance and complexity for the mother-daughter domestic drama of "Half a Heart." This is her first novel since "Before and After" (1992), in which she carefully rendered the interior spaces of a family soldered together, for better or worse, by violence and loss. With its probing story of a white Jewish mother and the half-black daughter who was lost to her during infancy, "Half a Heart" has glimmerings of that psychic capability. But the novel, which opens in 1986, is more far-flung and garrulous than it is deep.

In following the arc of Miriam Vener's life over a couple of decades, it volleys back and forth through the civil rights movement in Mississippi and the Houston milieu of comfortable, all-white privilege where she now lives, with day trips to New Hampshire and New York. The connecting link is Veronica Reece, an 18-year-old now living with her black father, Eljay Reece, in Brooklyn -- a savvy, walnut-skinned girl who just graduated salutatorian from a private school and is on her way to Stanford. Then one day a letter arrives with a Houston postmark, which is the first of Miriam's heart-rending efforts to correct the great wrong (and void) of both women's lives.

To its credit, "Half a Heart" is hardly a romanticized portrait of a sweet reunion between tragic mother and lost duckling. The first meeting between Miriam and Ronnee, as she's now called, is more summit conference than celebration, with each wary of the other and of her own feelings of ambivalence. Married to a successful, kind-hearted ophthalmologist, Miriam has long since given up her academic career, and seems to have spent the last several years poised between effete liberal and alienated Houston matron. She and her husband, Barry, have two sons and a daughter, all preteens, whom she's just packed off to summer camp. (This detail, like too much of the novel, feels mechanically convenient: temporarily empty nest, Houston summer, ensuing void -- all conspire to get that letter in the mail within the novel's opening pages.) Ronnee, who grew up with only shades of the truth about her absent white mother, is languishing in Brooklyn with Eljay, a charismatic activist who whisked her away from Miriam when she was 8 months old. The girl is also trying to figure out how to pay her tuition at Stanford -- "White Folks' Heaven," according to Eljay -- and this olive branch from her rich Texas mama couldn't have come at a better time. "If she acted it well enough," she thinks with determination about her reunion with Miriam, "it would buy her a future, since it was too late for a past."

So we're set for all kinds of regret, disappointment, grim resentment, and dual agendas by the time Miriam shows up at Ronnee's door. Suffering through their first few days together at the Veners' summerhouse in New Hampshire, the two are called back to Houston when Miriam's mother, in the early stages of Alzheimer's, takes a turn for the worse. Thus thrust into an oppressive (and all-white) world of entitlement, secrecy, and mannered nouveau riche, Ronnee does what any self-respecting angry teenager would do: She finds a boyfriend who will shock everybody, and she herself gets into trouble. And Miriam does what any guilt-ridden mother would do, which is to alternate between hating her present life and mourning her old one, between adoring her long-lost daughter and wanting to strangle her. Barry, who could have easily wound up a lost soul among all this yeasty working through, emerges as a decent guy -- someone who soldiers on within a milieu of hypocrisy and satin-voiced racism.

Scene by scene, "Half a Heart" is an uneven book. It possesses moments of agonizing authenticity, as when Miriam returns to the first horrid months after she lost Veronica. Her civil rights days, when she traveled to Mississippi with so many other young white idealists, are mostly delivered with a convincing mix of grace and irony; Brown isn't afraid to confront the rocky terrain where good intentions meet interracial estrangement. But often this novel relies on mere sentimentality when it might have aspired toward greater literary and psychological sophistication. The novel it most calls to mind is Jacquelyn Mitchard's "The Deep End of the Ocean": a riveting family drama, but limited by its own free fall into one character's soul.

Some of the problem is structural: You can feel Brown hurrying her characters from one locale or emotional stage to the next, and it feels as though the train took off an hour ahead of schedule. And some of it is credibility: By using a lengthy soliloquy from Miriam to relay the story of Ronnee's birth, she introduces certain facts that no mother ever would or should tell a child (Oh, honey, I thought about having an abortion! Aren't we glad I didn't?), then leaves us to believe that such a revelation would have no consequence. And while Miriam herself was surely meant to be someone whose central torment has fostered her confusion and complexity -- a woman up against her own fears and human failures -- she's often delivered with a narrative dissonance that makes her seem irritatingly contradictory. When Miriam is fighting the good fight in Mississippi in the 1960s, she comes across as a familiar, even sympathetic character; when she starts making revolutionary waves in Houston in the '80s, you simply want to spritz her off with ice water and tell her to get a job.

These are mostly amateurish errors that are beneath Brown, who is admired for her resonant characters. But the weaknesses of the novel don't much affect its high-octane momentum, which will appeal to buckets of readers in search of a respectable domestic soap: one with plenty of mother-daughter anguish and mint julep bigotry. Brown has done her novel a great service by making its most persuasive character a sullen young woman with her heart in two worlds -- walking the wilds of Houston's upper-crust suburbs, and knowing she's on the wrong side of town.