June 27 (Bloomberg) -- Joyce Carol Oates's 36th novel ranks among her most accomplished, atmospheric and personal. It's also one of her most frustrating -- an epic saga that contemplates identity, power, love and death without attaining true cohesion.

A novel in three parts, ``The Gravedigger's Daughter'' opens in 1959, as a young woman, Rebecca, crosses paths with a man in a panama hat while walking along a canal on the outskirts of Chautauqua Falls, New York. He claims to think she's Hazel Jones, a beneficiary of his father's will, though the truth behind this encounter won't become clear until the book ends 582 pages later.

Rebecca's identity will remain mutable throughout.

Her full name is Rebecca Schwart, and she was born to parents who fled Nazi Germany in 1936. Her father, a former math teacher, took the only job he could get, as a sexton. Traumatized by the past and humiliated by the present, he denies his Jewishness and rails against weakness. Rebecca's mother has been broken by grief ever since U.S. authorities turned back a refugee ship carrying her sister's family, the Morgensterns, in 1941.

When Rebecca is 13, her father shoots her mother and turns the gun on himself. At 17, she meets Niles Tignor, a crook twice her age whose rakish bonhomie conceals ``a ghastly nullity, chaos.'' He is an erratic, increasingly violent presence in her life, even after they marry and she gives birth to a son. When she and the boy finally leave Niles, she thinks back to that moment on the canal towpath and takes the name Hazel Jones.

Death and Fumes

Oates conjures up images of gothic memorability as she toggles between Rebecca's childhood and early adulthood in the first half of the novel. Water runs off the graveyard and into the Schwarts' cottage, carrying death with it. When Rebecca takes a job in a rubber factory, its fumes cling to her long dark hair. Tignor exudes brutish eroticism.

Parts two and three describe Rebecca's transformation into Hazel Jones. ``Keeping-going'' is her strategy: She moves from place to place, working as a waitress, a cleaner, a shop girl. She acquires the short hair, breezy laugh and ``liquidy movie- voice'' that seem to befit a Hazel Jones. Slowly, secrets fill the space where her heart once was, ``so many secrets, sometimes she couldn't get her breath.''

She eventually catches the eye of a kind, wealthy jazzman and allows him to fall in love with Hazel Jones, hiding her true past. Her son becomes a piano prodigy.

Serial Killer

This precis barely skims the contours of a plot that crams in characters ranging from a lost brother to a serial killer. Yet no strand is quite as compelling as Rebecca's reinvention of herself as perky, all-American Hazel Jones. For all the time and space she puts between herself and Rebecca Schwart, her father's warnings against weakness ring on in her ears. Every choice she makes only further marks her out as his daughter.

In the epilogue, a 62-year-old Rebecca writes letter after letter to an academic named Freyda Morgenstern, believing her to be one of the cousins whose boat was sent back to Europe all those years before. Rebecca's odyssey has come full circle, and every loose end has been diligently tied.

In a tantalizing twist, Oates dedicates the novel to her own grandmother, ``Blanche Morgenstern, the `gravedigger's daughter.'''

Oates is one of our most agile living storytellers; she has written plays and pseudonymous mysteries and thrillers as well as the 36 novels under her own name. Yet the plot runs away with ``The Gravedigger's Daughter,'' relentlessly whisking the reader past the novel's rich emotional and psychological insights. It becomes an exhausting experience, like reading three very different books at once.

There's much here to be moved and mesmerized by, not least Oates's linguistic verve. It's a pity that the novel's shifting form, like Rebecca's identity, keeps the reader off balance, leaving little time for reflecting on its quieter truths.

``The Gravedigger's Daughter'' is from Ecco in the U.S. and from Fourth Estate in the U.K. (582 pages, $26.95, 17.99 pounds).

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Hephzibah Anderson at hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com.

Last Updated: June 27, 2007 01:48 EDT