The bare, unattractive set consists of white walls, a floor, and a few boxes that have all been scumbled – a fate that should befall this show as soon as possible To 2 February (020-7226 1916). She calls herself Anellia, but we never learn what her real name is. She tries on identities like clothes, then tears them to pieces when her disguises fail her In fact, she disguises herself in order to be unmasked. In fact, she disguises herself in order to be unmasked. The protagonist of Joyce Carol Oates's new novel is the youngest child and only daughter of a poor farming family in upstate New York. Brilliant but isolated, she has been rejected by her father and three brothers because her mother died giving birth to her.

When her father turns travelling man, she is left to the mercies of her macho brothers – whom she nevertheless idolises.She describes herself as belonging to another species ("I was a freak") and loathes her tiny undeveloped body. A scholarship student wearing charity-shop clothes and reading Spinoza, she is pledged to Kappa Gamma Pi. The "Kappas" are the most glamorous, wealthy and empty-headed sorority on campus, their single aspiration to become engaged before graduation They are also racist bigots. Yet Anellia craves their acceptance and that of their housemother, Mrs Thayer, who is a paragon of propriety.Anellia was pledged to these unlikely sisters only to help them with their term papers.

Yet she goes into debt to pay her rent and is soon grubbing food from bins. At the Kappa alumnae reunion, a harrowing setpiece, she is discovered rifling Mrs Thayer's closets and publicly confesses to being part-Jewish: and therefore ineligible for Kappa membership.Anellia's reckless bravery goads her into the sin that will guarantee her beloved's permanent alienation. But her ensuing shame and self-loathing are a process of purification in which, by casting herself as the penitent, she is freed from "the perverse romance of addiction". Yet Oates never permits Anellia's anguished search for her mother and siblings to slide into Freudian clich?It is too raw ever to feel stale.Once again, Anellia chooses the most dangerous and inappropriate love object: an erudite and elusive philosophy student, Vernor Matheius. She follows him with canine devotion, and gradually he appears to return her love.