Real Americans : Sigrid Nunez’s characters, both comforted and troubled by their inability to belong, illustrate the complex loyalties that hold American immigrants together : A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD, <i> By Sigrid Nunez (HarperCollins: $18; 160 pp.)</i>

History repeats itself. Not just world events, but the minutiae of personal histories, which wind around and come back again. Sometimes, history echoes not so much in the sequence of events themselves, but in the resistance: We acknowledge, perhaps even surrender to the patterns by fighting them as much as by living them.

In Sigrid Nunez’s “A Feather on the Breath of God,” the daughter of a mixed-race immigrant couple surveys her parents’ lives and her own, painting a remarkable, often disturbing portrait, of her ambivalence about their legacy. She might have been many things, but ultimately, no matter what she does, she is who she is because of them.

A memoir written as a (first) novel, “A Feather on the Breath of God” never gives a name to its first-person protagonist (it mentions the name’s European roots, though), the offspring of a mysterious half-Chinese, half-Panamanian waiter and a vivacious, stubborn German housewife. This is not a tidy work. There are, as in real life, unanswered questions that remain unanswered; memories are sometimes crystalline, but sometimes muddy.

Nunez’s language throughout is spare, utterly lacking in sentimentality. “A Feather on the Breath of God” echoes Amy Tan (“The Joy Luck Club”) more than Ana Castillo or Janet Kauffman in its simplicity and nuance. Yet the voice doesn’t quite belong to any one group or genre: It aches with an awful, personal sense of loss. Throughout the book, there seems to be a little voice underneath the text speaking, not so much to the reader, but to the narrator’s parents: “This is what you made me,” “If not for you, I’d be someone different,” “I am so different from you.”

Nunez’s story is about continuity and contradiction. It is not an immigrant “Mommie Dearest,” nor does it traffic in psycho-willy-wabble, yet its tone is sometimes righteous, and sometimes judgmental (even as it struggles against it) and sometimes--just sometimes--a little close to petulant. But Nunez, perhaps, knows all this.

In “A Feather on the Breath of God,” everyone has taken a wrong turn somewhere in their journey, has recognized it, and yet feels compelled to continue down the wrong road. Amazingly, almost all of Nunez’s people ennoble themselves with loyalty to their wrong choices: The narrator’s parents are convinced they are wrong for each other yet never consider divorce; her lover and his wife are horribly mismatched yet he is incapable of leaving her; the narrator knows all too well that her decision to be alone promises loneliness, yet she cannot break her own patterns of love with unsuitable, ultimately unavailable men. The losses are measured in missed possibilities, in all the ways that life might have been.

All of Nunez’s characters share something else: secret lives that intrude. The father exists as a silent Buddha in a house filled with German knickknacks, but in Chinatown he is someone else completely. Who exactly, we don’t know; Nunez doesn’t know. But the gaps, the blank spaces from that life, are unavoidable. There was her father’s life in Panama, and before that in China: “How did the Chinese brothers treat him?” writes Nunez. “When he went to school--did he go to school?--was he accepted by the other children as one of them? Is there a Chinese word for half-breed, and was he called that name as we would be?” Both lives are outside the reach of the narrator’s knowledge and imagination and exist only through unanswered questions. Her mother too has secret lives, mysterious visitors--Rudolf, the man she could have married. The narrator imagines her mother has lovers, even though all the evidence suggests the contrary.

And, of course, there is the narrator’s own secret life--the one inconceivable to the immigrant parents, yet ironically the one she was born to because of their decision to come here. Education separates her from them, language separates them; technology, civil rights, the way they reflect on each other separates them.

Years later, the narrator’s married lover, Vadim, an immigrant from Odessa, spins fantastic tales about a life back in Russia that sound like “Clockwork Orange” in their brutality and absurdity. His life with his family, in their tiny New York apartment, living off his meager earnings as a cab driver, becomes the stuff of fantasy: She imagines his wife, his daughter, the members of the extended families, and is baffled by the complicated web of loyalties that hold them all together.

And it is here, when her lives with and without Vadim begin to bump up against each other, that history begins to improbably resonate. When she learns that Vadim’s wife calls her a whore, the narrator doesn’t even have to reject the term--that’s how far she’s traveled from those immigrant notions of morality, notions that, in fact, her parents would have shared. The moment is golden for Vadim’s wife as well: Both her suffering and her status are exalted by the discovery of the affair. Later, Vadim tells the narrator that his wife is better off than she because, at least, she is married and has a man.

That the narrator sees herself as different from both her parents and Vadim (who seem to fold into each other) is almost beside the point here. She has become as inscrutable as her stereotypically guarded Chinese father; as trapped into playing undesirable roles as her World War II German mother. And although she never marries Vadim, she is just as enamored of the inherent tragedy in their relationships as her parents were addicted to their own doom. The failures, the inexplicable gaps in the stories of their lives--that’s what give them all meaning. Her parents, Vadim and his bickering wife, they seem to be telling her that they had each other, even if just to fight with and resent, to fill up their emptiness.

In “A Feather on the Breath of God,” everybody’s heart is both tender and hard. Everybody’s lonely. They are all desperate to belong, know they cannot, and both comfort and torture themselves with what might have been.

In the end, the narrator--an independent woman now, a writer on her way to China to teach English, a modern American--has done little better in achieving happiness than the clumsy, desperate immigrants in her life. Indeed, as she embarks on her journey to China, she is in danger of--in her own way--repeating some of the same patterns of their immigrant experiences. Loss, disorientation, alienation--these are ordeals not affected by the direction the traveler takes, but are inherent in the traveling itself.

Nunez won a Whiting Award based on the first chapter of “A Feather on the Breath of God” and it is a well-earned honor. The book is smart, fresh. Still, there are a few problems. The book’s subtle style doesn’t quite succeed in hiding the narrator’s inability to give up control; she’s just a tad too cool, just a bit too much above the fray. There’s also the fact that Nunez insists on dropping meaningful quotes by the likes of Virginia Woolf, Nietzsche and Freud into the text. They’re a silly distraction, as if the narrator (Nunez?) is once more trying to make sure we see the distance between herself and her subjects. But with the possible exception of the Woolf quote, almost all of these could be left out and the story would be better served. Nunez doesn’t need Eliot, Poe and all the rest to make her point. She’s actually that good.

Besides, Nunez gives herself away entirely near the end of the book, when the narrator barely misses being raped. “I know people who would have seen such a narrow escape, had it happened to them, as proof that someone was watching over them,” she writes. “But I was used to feeling, whenever I heard about trouble striking someone else, how easily it could have been me. I lived under threat of harm at every moment of my life, violence and trouble were always looking for me, and if they missed me it was only by a hair, and next time they would not miss me.” That, much more than any story of successful American dreams realized, is her parents’ immigrant legacy.