WHAT WE LOST By Dale Peck Houghton Mifflin, $23, 229 pp Reviewed by KIT REED Although it's nowhere in the front matter of What We Lost, the book jacket of this fascinating hybrid by novelist/critic Dale Peck bears the subheading: "Based on a True Story." And, in a clarification of a recent James Atlas profile of the feisty thirtysomething writer, the New York Times found it necessary to state: "It is a memoir with some fictional accounts, not a novel." Somewhere between the intention and the act, what may have begun as a novel morphed into a memoir _ unless what may have been a memoir to both the author and his editor began looking more and more like a novel. In an interview sent out by his publisher, Peck himself calls his book "a hybrid, a nonfiction skeleton fleshed out by the imagination." This would be a matter of no particular interest if the author, who is famous for incendiary reviews of his literary colleagues, hadn't tossed down the gauntlet in the New York Times Magazine. When asked what he expects for What We Lost, Peck says, "It's impossible to review badly." In a way, he's right. If the reader is comfortable that the book is neither fish nor fowl, it should be fine, but in an odd way the mixing of genres defeats both purposes. This strong, sometimes excruciating account of an abused child's boyhood is powerful when it stays in the past _ New York state in the 1950s. But it is weakened by a leap into this century, where a girl commands center stage at too great length and for no apparent reason. Now, a novelist would have ended the book when the central character is forced to choose between wholesome farm life and a return to his toxic family, but Peck as memoirist finds it necessary to reconcile the narrator and his central character in the present. Since it is a book about the past reconstructed by the son of the central character, the entire business is tricky. What We Lost begins with a character Peck calls "the boy" being yanked out of bed by "the old man," his alcoholic father. One of a passel of children born to the boy's mother, the 14-year-old is, his father says repeatedly, his firstborn son. Together, they flee the cramped house where his siblings and half-siblings and brutal mother are sleeping. The writing is deft and gritty, with cadences and speech patterns driven by the work of Cormac McCarthy: "Then glass clinks as the old man opens his coat and pulls what looks like an empty bottle from a pocket in the lining, and when he arches his head back to suck whatever imagined vapor lingers in the brown glass the sound that comes from his loose dentures is the same sound that Gregory makes when his mother puts a bottle to his toothless lips. . . ." Together the miserable drunk and the boy leave their dump in civilized Long Island for rural upper New York state where, as it turns out, the old man frittered away his stake in the family farm. He dumps the boy, whom the farm work forges into a beginning adult, with a new family commanded by his uncle. Later the author finally names these two. They are "Dale Peck," both of them. A third "Dale Peck," born to the old man before his first wife left him, hovers over the boy's consciousness like a ghost waiting to materialize. Peck writes lovingly and in great detail about the physical world _ the silence of the woods after the crowded Peck house; the nightmare of trying to keep a sick animal alive. Because this is more memoir than novel, the boy, rehabilitated as he is, will not go on to triumph as a high school track star. Instead he will be forced to go home to putrid bedding and regular beatings in a house where his father grovels and soils himself in front of the local constabulary. There is no reconciliation, no understanding of what has befallen him; there is only bitter resignation. As novelist, Peck might have tried to pull more out of the life he has drawn, but as memoirist, he has a living prototype to deal with. The boy grows up. He has a son. He names the son Dale Peck, and in interviews, that son reports his father sometimes beat him. Candid biographies are written about dead people. Limited by the facts, the author cops out. To end on an up note, he segues into the consciousness of an upstate girl, Gloria Hull, meticulously detailing a lunch she made when the two Dale Pecks came to Scoharie County looking for Dale Sr.'s past: "As the girl looks at the son she suddenly feels the drama of the moment as he must, its simultaneous uniqueness and universality. . . . For a few seconds she understands what it is to feel like a character in a book." Fascinating. Flawed, but fascinating. Kit Reed's most recent novel is expectations. Her next is due out in June. Copyright 2003, Hartford Courant. Reprinted with permission.