At first glance, T Cooper’s debut novel, Some of the Parts (Akashic Books), looks as if it would be a dryly surreal joyride: " I was the newest addition to the freak show. And don’t think it was easy getting the job. " The narrator, Isak, then goes on to tell of her cohort: a snake charmer, a bearded lady, and a woman with a tail, and how she herself joined the crew, replacing " Henrietta Lee, the Herm-Aphrodit-E. " Throughout its first chapter, Parts seems hell-bent on weirdness, and it’s hard to know whether this world exists outside Isak’s head or whether it’s meant as some sort of allegory.

But Isak’s voice turns out to be as earthy and real as the musty stink of old carnival horror houses. Or Coney Island sideshow stages. Which is where she spent time working as . . . well, she never really gives her job description. She’s not a hermaphrodite, but she does look like a boy, and folks pay to guess her gender. It’s " the first time my body was exchanged for money, " she explains.

In that first chapter, Cooper sets down her novel’s primary themes: how we tend to define ourselves by others’ reactions to us, and how our expectations regarding gender play into our reactions to people. Standing on stage in her debut performance as a " freak, " Isak tells of her grade-school hassles when a teacher got mad at her for using the boy’s room, even though she’d been doing so since kindergarten. Then she turns the lens toward the reader, asking us, with regard to her gender, " Why is it so important that you know? "

Sexuality is fluid in Cooper’s story, which takes its title from a sentence in Virginia’s Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: " Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together? " The " parts " that concern Cooper are a woman (Arlene), her brother (Charlie), her daughter (Taylor), and Isak, whose past is with Charlie and whose future could be with Taylor. The HIV-positive Charlie is drawn to the handsome Isak but is still hung up on an old boyfriend. Taylor doesn’t care whether her sex targets are men or women, only that they worship her beauty and take care of her. Long-divorced Arlene runs an arts-and-crafts store; she’s the only character with anything like conventional notions of sexuality.

Of the four, Isak gets the most ink. Her freak-show entrance is so over-the-top and unreal that the rest of the book comes as a surprise: Cooper’s writing turns out to be simple and not very startling. Her writing is less intent on straining against convention than her characters are. Her prose tends to disappear behind the story itself, which is fine, but her characters are so complex, you might find yourself wishing for a few swashes of poetry.

After Isak’s intro, Cooper shifts the focus to Taylor, who is much like Isak. Both are dependent on other people’s response to their appearance; both use their looks to fix a spot for themselves in the world. People almost always mistake Isak for a handsome boy, but she lives under the perpetual threat of violence, which she tends to court. When a couple of NYC jerks start heckling her, calling her a " chick with a dick, " she plays into their crap and winds up with her head split open and determined to go home to Los Angeles, to her parents.

In LA, she meets up with Taylor, who has never known the threat of danger. Each moment of Taylor’s life has been a performance, as she waits to savor the sweetness of people’s response to her beauty. At the same time, she likes to deflect attention away from herself; introspection is an alien concept to her, one that Isak manages to push her toward. (Taylor is the only character that Cooper writes about in the third person rather than the first, and that gives her a certain distance and mystery.)

Taylor and Isak get in touch through Charlie, whom Isak is pulling away from. By the book’s conclusion, the " parts " have been brought together, all of them living in Arlene’s house and forming a hybrid sort of family, boy dog Mary included. Charlie’s HIV status suffuses the cozy setting with a melancholy glow and the reality of life’s transience. The last lines, like the first, are Isak’s: " I knew then that all of this would be brief. But it would be good. "