In this novel, Amelia Earhart, a castaway, decides she just doesn’t want to be rescued.

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, disappeared from the face of the earth. Coast Guard and Navy planes and ships dispatched to comb the area between Lae, New Guinea, and Howland Island found nothing but ocean. Since then, the search has continued in books and films analyzing Earhart’s motives for flying around the world, and in some case theorizing about what happened the day she disappeared. The simplest theory suggests that she ran out of gas over the Pacific; the more speculative, that she was pushed into an ill-considered flight in an ill-equipped plane by her publicity-happy husband, who had booked her into 70 post-flight lectures. There is even a conspiracy theory that has her on a spying mission for the United States to photograph Japanese island installations, during which she was either shot of forced down and then taken to Japan, where she became one of the English voices of the “Tokyo Rose” broadcasts.

Given the mystery of Earhart’s fate, it was inevitable that novelists would try their hand at filling in the blanks. Alison Anderson’s first novel, “Hidden Latitudes,” offers up Earhart as an unnamed elderly castaway, her account of her life and times on an unknown island is often vivid and moving despite an annoying side story.

When the novel opens, with the approach of a sailboat called the Stowaway, the Earhart character has been stranded for more than 40 years. The couple on board, Robin and Lucy, are in grave danger because their engine has failed, a situation that becomes more problematic when the hull of the Stowaway is damaged on a reef as they enter the lagoon. This clever setup seems to forecast the discovery of the famous aviator and her possible return to civilization. When she first sees the Stowaway on the horizon, Earhart considers lighting a signal fire, as she has done in the past whenever a ship was near. But then she has second thoughts: “I wonder if rescue would still be worth it.”

The underpinnings of this startling revelation come in a series of dreamlike soliloquies as, carefully hidden, she watches Robin and Lucy work on their boat or explore the island. She muses about her flying career, the crash, the difficulties she and Fred encountered in adapting to a new existence. There are harrowing accounts of the appearance of Japanese sailors during the war and of the brief visit of an islander who refused to take her into his flimsy boat when he departed.

“It took me a long time to like it here,” Earhart confides. Not until Fred rowed off in a rubber dinghy to spare her the pain of watching him die from an infection did she “surrender” to the “magic” of her environment, a mystical serenity that “might end and return to the deep source of the island” if she reveals herself to Robin and Lucy.

The greatest strength of “Hidden Latitudes” lies in Ms. Anderson’s ability to show how isolation redefines Earhart’s character. The ache of loneliness, her growing intimacy with nature, the way she ultimately finds consolation in self-awareness tap into something elemental that catches fire in the reader’s imagination. Though Earhart’s ambivalence toward rescue initially seems far-fetched, it quickly becomes believable once we understand that her familiarity with the island has replaced her feelings about the world she came from. The place she knew is now the unknown, the dangerous.

Unfortunately, the Earhart chapters are far more affecting than those devoted to Robin and Lucy, though the description of a tropical storm in one of them is among the best things in the book. The main problem is that the damaged boat blatantly symbolizes the troubled marriage of these disaffected teachers sailing around the world in search of meaning. Robin wants a child to solidify their relationship; Lucy doesn’t, afraid it would tie her down and make her even more dependent on her husband. Both reflect obsessively on what has gone wrong between them. Here is Robin, repairing the hull: “Easy to fix, in a way, he thinks; if only wounds to the human heart were as simple to repair.” After satisfying sex on the beach, Lucy thinks that the problem with their marriage “is that we do not have enough moments like that, of spontaneity, sensuality, abandon. We run on rails, we don’t know how to get off, so we speed on through, everything becoming a blur of the half-seen, the half-felt. We miss the richness of the wayside.”

Such writing, with its echo of “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” columns, becalms the narrative between the Earhart chapters. But despite the generic conflict between Robin and Lucy, “Hidden Latitudes” succeeds in making Amelia Earhart’s isolation and attendant fears palpable. Ms. Anderson’s rendering of the aviator’s hard-won serenity leads one to hope that if she lived beyond July 2, 1937, it was with the grace she is granted here.

Lawrence Thornton, The New York Times Book Review, July 21, 1996.