Annie Gianfala, seventeen years old and forsaken by her father, is penniless and alone. She goes west, as America did, but she journeys in the years before World War II. She drifts on the currents of the Depression, of enthusiasm for the Communist Party and Russia, and of distaste for the Party and its birthplace. She meets, and is educated by, in the senses as much as in the mind, louts, layabouts, jaded intellectuals, lovers of various stripes—including Walter Vogel, the merchant marine sailor whom she marries—as well as varieties of Party functionaries, black men, gay men, and every kind of failed and failing writer. Annie is both a waif and a woman of power. Men bring her their bodies as if bearing a gift, and she tends to accept them. Sad news for men: their bodies do not matter much. This novel, which so splendidly inhabits the senses, transcends them. And so does Annie. Early on, in fact, a kind of physical revulsion in her is clear; soon enough it becomes spiritual. Then we realize that we are in a territory shared with Paula Fox by James Purdy—in the fauvist, piano-playing boy of the book’s beginning and end; in Annie herself, an innocent with whom men beg to entrap themselves—as Ms. Fox writes victims who are pitched up upon demanding, even dangerous, people and learn from them, willy-nilly, life’s cruel lessons.

First readers of The Western Coast will find a narrative intelligence so strong, an analysis so piercing, that they will be unsurprised to find that a number of intellectuals of the 1970s averted their eyes. They found themselves in this novel—as (among others) the Party Pasionaria, Fern, unshakably, stupidly loyal to her dogma; seeking to skewer others, she skewers herself while condemning “the soft-brained New York swimming-pool Jews with their hysterical, vicious anti-Bolshevik attacks on Comrade Stalin’s tactics.” A generation of blind political enthusiasts is drowned in that condemnation. But Ms. Fox’s eye is not only cruel: it is accurate, it can be gentle, and it is always just—as we find in this description: “Fern’s father had been a bookbinder and, once out of work, moved through the little rooms of the house like an exiled prince, remarking acidly on the fine and dependable qualities of leather.” That description evokes a lifetime’s imprisoned conclusion, and its sorrow is palpable.