Fiction Chronicle.

NO ONE By Gwenaelle Aubry. Translated by Trista Selous. Tin House, paper, $12.95. The question of identity haunts Aubry's slim, tough novel about a Parisian lawyer suffering from bipolar disorder and the havoc he causes in the lives of those close to him. Written from a daughter's perspective after her father's death (and with names unchanged to create a blurry fictional boundary), ''No One'' takes the unusual form of a memoir-as-alphabet-book, with each letter illustrating a different aspect of Francois-Xavier Aubry's life and illness. ''H,'' for example, is for ''Hoffman (Dustin),'' whom her father strongly resembled. The writer recalls watching ''Kramer vs. Kramer'' and ''thinking, looking at this father alone in an apartment with his child, that he had done just that for us too, . . . keeping his ghosts and delusions at bay to perform the actions that cradle childhood.'' The elder Aubry's madness manifested itself in a 200-page manuscript on which he scrawled the words ''To be novelized,'' an injunction the author honors by liberally quoting from her father's own words. The lives of the mentally ill and those who care for them are inevitably visited by repetition and exhaustion, and Aubry's meticulous explication of her father's condition can't help containing instances of both. Yet her virtuosic sentences and ingenious structure make up for the narrative stasis. The reader feels privileged to gain access to these troubled minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]