THE GIRL WHO grows up in The Illumination of Alice Mallory (HarperCollins, 175 pages, $19.95 cloth), by Maureen Moore, lives in a rotting North Vancouver bungalow with her maniacal mother, her sad little half brother David, and Mr. Goldman, David`s father. At least, she lives there bodily; mentally, she lives in novels. Having drifted through grade nine in a haze of fiction, she left school in grade 10 and became a clerk at Woolworth`s. Now, captivated by D. H. Lawrence, she awaits her transformation into his ideal not ural woman. Predictably Alice falls for James, a halfbaked Intellectual teaching night school while writing his Ph.D. thesis on Lawrence It`s a 1958 version of an old story: a mediocre, dependent, weak, preening graduate student manoeuvres an idealistic girl into his bed by filling her hungry mind with junk philosophy. Alice`s literary yearnings and her determination to rise above her domestic squalor make her the perfect Galatea to James`s Pygmalion, the Mellors to his Lady Chatterley. The end of the romance is also predictable, though the end of the book is not. In spite of her betrayal by James and Lawrence, and in spite of having motherhood thrust upon her, Alice resolves that she will "still enter that other, vivid world of art and literature:" Maureen Moore has made The Illumination of Alice Mallory funny, true, and painful at the same time; she has also led Alice to self understanding and to greater understanding of humanity.