LOCAS.<i> By Yxta Maya Murray</i> .<i> Grove Press: 256 pp., $22</i>

When street gangs and literature intersect, it’s the guys who get the attention. Because male gang members are the ones whose actions routinely make the nightly TV news, most books about gangs--whether they’re fiction or nonfiction--tend to be similarly gender-skewed.

When I first wrote about the gangs of the Pico-Aliso housing projects of East Los Angeles, I also fell victim to the follow-the-violence syndrome. It’s easy to become mesmerized by the extravagantly tragic young men and to miss the finely tuned dramas of the women. Consequently, Yxta Maya Murray’s debut novel, “Locas,” arrived like the welcome voice of a girlfriend on an otherwise guy-filled day.

Murray and I recently participated in a discussion about L.A. gang life, and I found her remarks to be gutsy and articulate. Asked about “Locas,” she explained that she had attempted to explore the notion of the homegirl as mythical outlaw using gang membership as a symbolic path to self-hood and empowerment. Cool idea, I thought. Thelma and Louise in the barrio.

Murray, a 28-year-old associate law professor at Loyola Law School, seemed like the perfect writer to take such an urban transformation tale and really run with it. She had written an impressive string of short stories and essays that promised even better things to come once she threw her engine into high gear within the longer fictional form of the novel. Now that “Locas” has arrived, however, the news is both good and bad.

In terms of its central metaphor, Murray’s work is fierce and persuasive. The core of her plot is suggested by her title. Locas literally translates as “crazy females.” Yet in gang parlance, loco--or loca in the feminine gender--means another kind of crazy. It’s the craziness of someone with nothing left to lose. So crazy you don’t blink in the face of danger; so crazy you’ll do whatever has to be done. Taken to its furthest extremes, it’s the craziness of the outlaw unfettered by the rules and conventions of the dominant class. So crazy, that you’re free.

It is this emancipation Murray has in mind for her protagonists, Lucia and Cecilia, the young women from whose point of view the story is alternately told. A third character is Manny, the head of an Echo Park gang called the Lobos. Lucia is Manny’s girlfriend, his “sheep”--Murray’s jargon for the passive girls who, in this particular gang world, exist only to flatter and service the guys. Cecilia is Manny’s adoring younger sister and is willing to do anything just to stay in his favor. As the book begins, both girls find meaning and radiance through his reflected glory; by the end, Lucia and Cecilia have become locas.

Lucia’s route to liberation is to become badder than all the guys in order to displace Manny as the Lobos’ leader. Her more-hardass-than-thou transformation takes some doing because Murray’s homeboys are an unsympathetic and predatory bunch whose raison d’e^tre doesn’t extend beyond selling guns, dealing drugs and jockeying for position within the gang hierarchy. Lucia’s moment of Darwinian dominance comes when she finds the Lobos huddled in a paralyzed clump after having fatally beaten an enemy’s 10-year-old brother. She praises them for a job well done, then shoos them away from the crime scene, congratulating herself for her unflinching ferocity. “I knew it for sure then. Nobody, nobody can tough it out like this chica can.”

Cecilia’s freedom comes at the other end of the continuum, when she finally recoils from the unbridled aggression around her. After suffering the blows of a miscarriage and a lost love, she finds solace in her role as a faceless, egoless housekeeper riding the bus to clean the homes of white women who always call her by the wrong name. Cecilia placidly suffers these indignities and surrenders her heart and soul to God. Hers is not the wrathful, bossy deity presented by the local priest (it seems all the men in this book, the priest included, are brutes or fools or both), but a personal creator who perceives her deepest needs. “Maybe I got my own God sitting right here, waiting till I bloom like that flower I once had turning inside me. Then he’ll show me my good thing, waiting so patient behind the dark trees in the park.”

Murray is a stunningly original prose stylist capable of fashioning exhilarating twirls and dips of dialogue that ring as authentic. In fact, these dialogues are an intriguing pastiche of jargon boasting a multi-stranded provenance. Some phrases are retooled from the cholo slang of the early ‘60s. Others are shiny beads of vernacular that Murray has faceted from colloquial Spanish and her own imagination. Even the rhythms of the girls’ speech recall a different time and place. These locas speak at the speed of rancheras music, not at the speed of hip-hop. Yet the rhythms are so sweet and seductive that you’re tempted to drive to the nearest poetry venue and recite aloud from any page and blow the audience away.

The delight one feels in Murray’s obvious talent makes the flaw of the book all the more unnerving: “Locas” is presented as a fictional, but accurate, slice of inner-city life. This is unfortunate. Although Murray’s book has value as metaphor, it is sure to do harm if viewed as ethnographic reality.

The blurb on the jacket of “Locas” calls the book “ . . . a pirate radio broadcast straight from the urban core.” The uninitiated reader will have no cause to dispute this and will assume that Murray has provided an armchair-safe but genuine visit to the hidden and dangerous world of gangs. Yet her vision of gang life appears to be cobbled together from newscast hyperbole, snippets of other books and our own worst fears. The gang members who populate this imagined world are, with few exceptions, caricatures of cartoon villainy tricked out in inner-city garb.

Child gangsters are the modern bogeymen of the American middle class. Our current “punish, don’t rehabilitate” public policy toward law-breaking adolescents is the result of hysteria that sees most urban youth as inhuman creatures, whose motivations and desires are beyond the ken of civilized folk. That a writer of Murray’s talent mistakenly perpetuates these demonizing stereotypes cannot help but be heartbreaking to those who work to help provide alternatives for the kids who join gangs for tragic, but all too human, reasons.

While preparing to review “Locas,” I gave copies to two young women--Erica Parra and Grace Campos, 22 and 21, respectively--both Latinas, both veteranas of the milieu that Murray purports to describe. Parra and Campos were completely undone by Murray’s representation of the world they know intimately. “Nobody I know is like that,” said Erica. “White people who read this will think we’re a bunch of monsters,” Grace added.

I suspect Murray’s objective was artistic and honorable: She wanted to provide a compelling backdrop for the two protagonists who had sprung to life in her head. Surely one is allowed flights of imagination in the service of good fiction. With “Locas,” however, one ignores the cultural context into which the book arrives only at one’s peril. Imagine publishing a novel that depicts Native Americans as pitiless savages during the Indian-hating 1850s. Such a book, no matter how skillfully crafted, could not help but be a part of the problem. As a coming-of-age fable, Murray’s story is passionate, poetic and, in so many ways, dazzling, but as a window into real life, it’s a saddening misstep.