'Life in Miniature': A slice of a familiar flat and round world

Here is a first novel that will interest anyone attempting to write one. "Life in Miniature" offers, by its example, a compendium of lessons about making fiction. (E.M. Forster wrote a book about it long ago called "Aspects of the Novel." He talks about round characters and flat characters, which is just another way of saying some characters are more important than others.)

Linda Schlossberg sets out her characters like this: The "round" ones are Adie, who's 11 as the narrative begins; her teenage sister Miriam; and their mother, Mindy, who's just come home from a short stay at a mental hospital. It's nothing to worry about: She seems just about as crazy as everybody else's mother.

Wise children stuck with wacky mothers and other unreliable grown-ups: This is a classic plot, employed by respected contemporary writers such as Janet Fitch and Mona Simpson, and "Life in Miniature" is a good addition to the genre. The time is the 1980s in Southern California, and a very prominent "flat" character here is Nancy Reagan, who has recently mounted her "Just Say No" campaign. The first lady feels, apparently, that drugs are everywhere and that the younger generation is on the fast track to hell.

Adie's mother takes Mrs. Reagan seriously. "I want you girls to know that you can talk to me about anything. It's important for us to have open lines of communication," she says. "If anyone offers you drugs - marijuana, anything - you just walk away. . . . And you tell me about it."

Except nobody offers the little girls anything. They live in a calm domestic world where the worst thing that happens to them is being teased at school about their kooky mother. But their kooky mother persists. She lives in a world dreamed up by public relations people who know how to drive ordinary people to the brink of lunacy. "Just Say No" has sparked a generational war that may have ended up doing more harm than the drugs did.

Every time Mindy brings her car to a screeching halt and conducts a track-mark check on her daughters' forearms, Miriam's open contempt for her mother grows. And Adie declines further into wretchedness. Mindy is also convinced she's being followed by two men in a white car. Are they drug pushers? Communists? We never know. But the plot is engaging: two plucky little girls tormented on a daily basis by a certifiable nut case. What will happen next?

I won't give away the plot because I don't know the plot. The author doesn't either, I imagine. When Part II starts, the setting is altogether changed. One of the major characters has run away; there are a few new flat characters who say the equivalent of, "You mean, he left the knife . . . " But Part II is entirely different from Part I. Mom cuts way down on her drug examinations and her obsessions about total strangers offering her daughters drugs. She still feels she's being followed by men in a white car, but we are never offered the faintest clue why, and nothing happens.

I can hear creative writing students petulantly responding that nothing much happens in real life anyway, that this author is trying to capture the true elements of our existence. But I think I would have to say to them that Aristotle was right: A decent story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. If not, you're in danger of squandering the riches and fascination that your characters - both flat and round - have been giving you all along.

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LIFE in MINIATURE

By Linda Schlossberg.

Kensington. 325 pp. Paperback, $15