Pushed to Survival : PUSH.<i> By Sapphire (Knopf: $20; 179 pp.)</i>

“I was left back when I was 12 because I had a baby for my fahver.”

The opening line of Sapphire’s first novel hits the reader like a Mack truck, and it clearly signals that the literary ride ahead won’t be in your father’s Oldsmobile. The journey of Harlem teenager Claireece Precious Jones is sickening and confusing, painful and hopeful. By turns thought-provoking and horrifying, “Push” is sure to provoke passionate debate about the book’s literary merits and the author’s talents--as well as issues ranging from incest to teen pregnancy, literacy programs and welfare reform. Despite its shortcomings, “Push” is a stunningly frank effort that marks the emergence of an immensely promising writer.

At its most fundamental, “Push” is an up-by-the-bra-strap success story, predictable as a TV movie refashioned for the downbeat ‘90s. It features the understandably enraged, savagely funny, totally unique voice of its protagonist. When we meet her, 16-year-old Precious is anything but what her name implies--she’s obese, illiterate and pregnant by her father for the second time. She’s physically and sexually abused by her equally depraved mother, who keeps the young girl virtually trapped in her own home, feeding the mother’s culinary and sexual appetites: “She ain’ circus size yet but she getting there,” Precious notes.

Although right-wingers might dismiss the real-life Preciouses of this world as the Willie Hortons of welfare, Sapphire gives the fictional Precious something that surveys and case studies do not--a mind, a heart and a ferocious rage to survive that ignite the book and make it strangely compelling, for all of the horror Precious relives in the telling.

Precious finds salvation when she is expelled from Harlem’s P.S. 146 and enrolls in an alternative school, Each One/Teach One. Sensing the opportunity to escape from her abusive parents, Precious must push aside the memories of cruel molestation swimming in her head--the images she carries of herself as invisible, black and ugly, her fear of becoming a target of ridicule--and make her way into the classroom that first day:

“I takes in air through my nose, a big big breath, then I start to walk slow to the back. But something like birds or light fly through my heart. An’ my feet stop. At the first row. An’ for the first time in my life I sits down in the front row.” Precious’ guide out of her living hell is Blue Rain, the instructor in her pre-G.E.D. reading class, who encourages the teenager to keep a journal. Her initial entries are so indecipherable that Rain transcribes the words the badly abused girl can barely form: “li Mg o mi m” (Little Mongo on my mind), a pained reference to her retarded firstborn, always on the young mother’s mind.

Astute readers will draw parallels between Precious’ emerging identity and language skills and those of Celie in Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” Sapphire almost invites the comparison when she places Walker’s novel in Precious’ bookcase, and later liberally quotes Walker’s characters, along with the poetry of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes. But while it is interesting to see how Walker, Hughes and novelist Audre Lorde influence the fictional Precious, Sapphire could learn much from these masters--especially when it comes to creating an internally consistent black dialect for Precious to speak and write.

As it stands, “Push” is wildly inconsistent in its narrative voice and use of language. The criticism, however, is leveled reluctantly and with much sympathy for the author’s dilemma: How do you write a book about a protagonist who can barely read or write? The author’s solution is to mostly write in Precious’ voice, although there is a lengthy section of the first chapter that inexplicably--and annoyingly--shifts to a distant third-person narrator.

Sapphire’s attempt to replicate her character’s speech on the page is even more unsettling. In “Push,” Precious sometimes drops the final G (as in “gettin’ ”), sometimes not. In some passages she says “that’s” and later “thas.” Occasionally, the conceit works to great effect--it makes perfect sense that Precious wouldn’t want to know how to spell the reviled words “mother” and “father” over the names of heroes Louis Farrakhan, Harriet Tubman and Alice Walker. But trying to figure out why she can spell “Mongoloid,” “intercourse” or “dungeon” and not “electric” interferes too frequently with the intense narrative that Sapphire works hard to achieve.

This is a dilemma other writers have handled with success. The well-crafted and well-edited novels of Walker, J. California Cooper, A.J. Verdelle’s “The Good Negress” and the poetry of Hughes solved the problem by developing a grammar consistent in usage and context, albeit unfamiliar to some readers.

Another shortcoming in “Push” is the lack of narrative balance. The scenes of Precious’ torment at the hands of her parents are retold in horrific detail and searing imagery. But her hard climb upward to even the middle of life’s crystal stair--to borrow, as does the author, from Hughes’ famous poem “Mother to Son”--seems almost remotely experienced by comparison.

Still, the novel is intense and unflinching in its portrayal of abuse suffered by women and children. To her credit, Sapphire provides much-needed balance and a sense of triumph in “Push” through a highly charged scene at an incest survivors’ group late in the book. There is also an appendix, “Life Stories,” which includes excellent poetry by Precious and the writing of other students that opens up the narrative, revealing the diverse lives of the young women who have slipped through society’s illusory safety net. For this reader, being privy earlier to the transformation of these characters--by experiencing their interaction and writing--would have made me care even more about their fates, making their achievement ultimately more moving and satisfying.

Regardless of the controversy that may surround the book’s themes, perspective or language, “Push” is an impressive yet deeply flawed debut. One hopes Sapphire will continue to nurture her original voice, while incorporating difficult themes like incest and abuse--which she also explored in her earlier poetry collection, “American Dreams”--into a broader vision of the black and human experience.