'By Blood' by Ellen Ullman

BY BLOOD, by Ellen Ullman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 378 pp. $27.

'By Blood" sounds like the latest thriller from P.D. James or Patricia Cornwell, right? Well, it is indeed a thrilling page-turner of a book, but Ellen Ullman eludes simple genre categorization.

The "blood," in fact, refers not to blood spilled, but to blood relatives. Having made her mark with a memoir and a first novel, "The Bug," which drew on her 20 years as a computer programmer, Ullman here mines another aspect of her own life -- her adoption.

And what a miner she turns out to be. This is hardly your average "in search of birth mother" story, as Ullman traffics in everything from psychotherapy and voyeurism to Patty Hearst and the Holocaust. Oh, and hot lesbian sex. Lest you think any of this is gratuitous, the mix is seamless and the novel deeply humanist.

The setup is first-rate. In 1970s San Francisco, an unnamed professor on leave from a university rents an office in an old building to prepare lectures on Aeschylus' "The Eumenides." His neighbor is a psychotherapist whose noise machine keeps her sessions secure, except those of the one nameless patient who hates the machine -- and so the professor hears all about the patient's relationships with her lesbian partner and her adoptive mother.

Faster than you can say "Freud's your uncle," the narrator is seduced. It's as if one of Poe's obsessive and potentially perverse narrators turned up in a Philip Roth novel like "The Human Stain." Maybe that leave isn't a voluntary sabbatical?

The thrill for him, though, isn't sexual. He's invested in the patient realizing that it doesn't matter who her birthparents are because it's better to let the mystery be, to be free to forge your own identity rather than have that identity tied to parental behavior. (He comes from a family in which suicide was kind of a parlor game.)

Ullman pretty much agrees with him, or at least she did in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, but she doesn't stack the deck. There's complexity to all the characters and viewpoints, though it's the patient's quest to uncover and understand her roots that becomes the spine of the book.

She's the character we're constantly rooting for -- without damning the narrator. We become thoroughly complicit, not wanting him to stop or be caught because we want to know how this terrific story turns out. But there's more to the book than that. The moral universe that Ullman creates is constantly fascinating, constantly challenging. She describes an America in which the Zodiac killings and the Hearst kidnapping are simply incorporated into the culture as the new normal. Could that be what it was like during the Holocaust for the Germans?

Book clubs of America, take note. "By Blood" is what you should be reading. Ullman is someone we all should be reading.