Books

If ever there was a subject about which most readers can say unequivocally, "I know how I feel about that," child pornography surely qualifies. It's despicable, it's criminal, it's an easy call.

Oh ... except maybe when that picture of a naked little girl, one leg perched suggestively on a bathtub rim, gets blown up to 5-feet-square and displayed in a ritzy Manhattan gallery. By her mother, who happens to be the photographer. Then it's art. Or is it? And who decides?

That's the delicate subject – sure to cause heated discussion around the book-club table – tackled by Dani Shapiro in her searing new novel, Black & White.

In one alarming instance, Ruth waits till the dead of night, then bundles Clara out of bed for the photo shoot. When Clara, exhausted and chilly (all the Clara photos are nudes), starts fussing and then screaming, Ruth has to convince the New York City police that all is well.

But, of course, it's not. As "the Claras" gain more notoriety, with museums and superstars acquiring them, the child becomes a minor celebrity, with strangers noticing her as "the girl in those photos" on a regular basis.

She becomes emotionally shut off from her mother – to Ruth, she's just "work" – even as her sister, Robin, feels that Clara gets all the attention. The girls' father questions Ruth's use of Clara, particularly as the sexual overtones in the photos become more palpable, and briefly puts a stop to it. The media also note the "child pornography" implications, but in a tabloid way that escapes legal attention.

Clara leaves home at 18, gets married and moves to small-town Maine, effectively cutting off contact with her family and building a new one – which eventually includes a little girl, Samantha, who looks – disturbingly, to Clara – just like Clara as a youngster.

At 32, Clara gets sucked back into the storm's vortex when Robin calls, needing help with their now terminally ill mother. Clara reluctantly returns to the city, leaving a baffled child behind: Clara has never told Samantha about the photos or her famous photographer grandmother.

As Clara tentatively builds a renewed relationship with her mother, who remains ever-haughty and self-centered despite debilitating cancer, Ms. Shapiro forages a remarkably clear-eyed path through the muddle of issues at hand: mother-daughter love and loyalty, the limits of a parent's ownership of a child's privacy (or lack thereof), the disclosure of family secrets to a new generation.

Ms. Shapiro's greatest accomplishment in Black & White is that she avoids making Ruth look like a complete monster; she comes off, instead, as a complex, selfish woman who simply allows her own needs to upstage those of her child.

Clara, however, proves the real revelation, reliving her own difficult childhood while at the same time navigating that of her daughter, and making a surprising climactic decision that will undoubtedly add to those book-club debates.

Joy Dickinson Tipping is the author of two travel books and a frequent contributor to the Books pages.

Dani Shapiro

($24, Knopf)