Barker's characters may sound less like material for serious drama than a shelfload of case histories, but Barker details the particularities of each life so richly and carefully that she cannot be mistaken for either a dry sociologist or a sentimental reporter. Some readers may object that Barker has made her characters laugh with such bitter humor, that one cannot help but yearn for some illusion of a possible escape.

But her vision is as unremitting as the world she describes, and her hard, spare prose is as chilling. Of Alice's final struggle she writes: "In the ruins of her mind, something so new and unused that it could only be spirit was struggling to stand up. Oh, but it was hard. She could not sustain the effort. She fell back, she dwindled, became again a heap of old garbage waiting for the pit. She preferred it like...