The territory behind

"Divisadero" is a haunting, meticulously conceived novel broken like a mirror into two parts -- its shards jagged and dangerous, essential to each other to become whole. The first story takes place in Northern California in the 1980s, on a farm near Petaluma, where two young sisters rise each day to help their father and the hired hand, Coop, with the cows and horses. But Coop is more son than employee, just as Anna and Claire are a mirage of souls growing up together but unrelated. After Anna's mother died in childbirth, her father, finding the infant Claire orphaned in the same hospital, brought home both girls to raise alone. And Coop was a boy on a neighboring ranch; when his parents were killed in an act of random violence, the girls' family took him in. Shimmering in the rough perfection of youth, the sisters and Coop form a classic triangle, with the attendant themes of longing and brotherly love just waiting to happen: When the father finds Anna in the arms of Coop, he beats the young man nearly to death. And so the three disperse like milkweed in the wind, leaving the father, Lear-like, with his empty rage.

It might just as well have been Claire instead of Anna; as the title of "Divisadero" testifies, this is a novel about split identity -- about the borderlands between heart and skin that test and define us all. It is Claire who finds Coop, half- conscious, and drags him to safety; Claire who finds him again, years later, in the backlands of Nevada -- stacking the deck for a living as a card sharp and getting out of town just before dawn. Loving Anna as he did, the young man has already proven that he "loved risk and could be passive around danger"; all the playing cards do is put a red-and-black definition to that fundamental character.