BOOKS OF THE TIMES;A Life Haunted by a Seldom-Seen Weird Father

HALF A LIFE By Jill Ciment 210 pages. Crown Publishers. $23.

It's no surprise to learn that Jill Ciment, the author of this luminous memoir, once studied to be a painter. Sad, funny and affecting, "Half a Life" is animated by reminiscences that are so emotionally detailed, so physically well observed that they burn an image in the reader's memory, like paintings glimpsed at an exhibition.

Ms. Ciment tells us about her father, drifting further and further from his family, obsessively, ceaselessly gardening, stooped over his rosebushes in the dark, flashlight in hand. She tells us about her mother, frantically studying to become a court stenographer, practicing in front of the television, taking dictation from "McHale's Navy," "The Robert Goulet Hour" and reruns of "I Love Lucy." And she tells us about herself as a teen-ager, breaking into strangers' cars, rummaging through their glove compartments and trying to use the personal possessions she found there to imagine a life against which she could measure her own.

Some of the characters in this memoir will be familiar to readers of Ms. Ciment's first novel, "The Law of Falling Bodies": a teen-age girl who dreams of having a real home; her charming, compulsive mother, who is constantly dreaming of a better life, and an older man who holds out the promise of stability and love.

In "Half a Life," however, the missing figure in "Falling Bodies" -- the teen-age girl's father -- assumes a dominant role: a ghost, more than a real presence, who haunts his daughter's entire life.

Things began to unravel, Ms. Ciment recalls, when her family left Canada for Los Angeles, that sunny promised land where their hopes for a brighter future fractured and fell apart.

"The year was 1964," she writes. "Whenever I envision that journey, a couple of images come to mind. The first was fed to me by my mother and holds within its aura the power and pull of her imagination. It's a picture of my father, and within him, some vital aspect of his being -- his moral fiber, a stitch that fastens him to reality -- somehow getting snagged on our front porch in Montreal so that as we roll across the country, inch by foot by yard, he slowly comes undone."