Push, recently retitled Precious to coincide with the release of the film upon which it's based, isn't the first book about a black girl impregnated by her father. It is, however, almost certain to remain the most searing book of its kind.

Years after Toni Morrison first covered this bleak fictional terrain with her 1970 book The Bluest Eye, she lamented that her story about 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove "required a sophistication unavailable to me."

Drawing her 192-page book from seven years teaching reading and writing to young women in Harlem and Bronx, author Sapphire found the ideal run-around to Morrison's original dilemma. Rather than aim for high art and polish, she instead went straight to the gut by co-opting not only the dialect of her subject, 16-year-old Claireece "Precious" Jones, but her very interior consciousness as well.

The result is a book where narrative form not only matches its harrowing content, but pummels you into the mind of a person so degraded and abused that her crude descriptions and defiant misspellings open the book like a physical confrontation.

The book is a maddening mix of profanities, meandering daydreams, crude rage, pornographic incest and repetitious self-loathing. That is, until you realize Sapphire's method does her subject perfect justice. The only words adequate for the task are those of Precious herself. The only thing more offensive than this book's blast furnace of screaming dialogue and blistering descriptions would be a false veneer of polite exchanges and precise scenery.

Pregnant by her father twice, a mother at age 12 to a Down syndrome baby, and abused by her welfare mother in every conceivable way (including sexually, an element the film adaptation discards), Precious exists so devoid of hope and affection that her only escape is playing television scenes and movies in her mind:

"But I can see when the picture come back I don't exist. Don't nobody want me. Don't nobody need me. I know who I am -- vampire sucking the system's blood. Ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for."

The anchor of this hopelessness is her mother, who condones her daughter's sexual abuse as punishment for stealing her husband's affection. At school, she's jeered at because of her weight, sitting at her desk in a depression so catatonic she can only urinate onto the floor. All this is described pages before her greatest misfortune is revealed.

What saves the book from monotone futility is Precious' brazen defiance and even humor. She mispronounces her incest support group as "insect support group," then laughs when someone tells her there's a difference between cockroaches and men who rape their daughters. Salvation peeks through when Precious finds a mentor in Blue Rain, an alternative-school teacher who encourages journal writing -- and thus literacy -- for both therapy and education.

It's unfortunate the 1996 book's original title is in danger of being surpassed by the movie's. "Push" is what you do giving birth to your father's children. It's what you keep on doing for the life that follows.

"Ms Ran say we can nt escap the pass," Precious writes in words as broken as her soul, "the way free is hard."