Life On Hemlock Street

By MARGARET CARLSON

SEVENTH HEAVEN by Alice Hoffman; Putnam; 256 pages; $19.95

In her eighth and by far best book, Alice Hoffman creates characters so true to their moment in time that future generations trying to reproduce life in a Long Island suburb in 1959 could use this as a blueprint. Hoffman introduces us to Nora Silk as she is moving into a little box of a home, so much like the others "that children wandered into the wrong house for cookies and milk." Her feckless husband, a magician who cannot even get hired for children's birthday parties, has left her and fled to Las Vegas, where he hopes to perfect his lounge act. Towing Billy, her eight-year-old who sometimes wore a look so awful "complete strangers had to fight off the urge to smack him," and a baby "who hadn't the slightest notion of what a father was," she arrives exhausted at her Hemlock Street dream house. Confronted by a lawn grown weedy, a kitchen reeking of rotten garbage, and a stopped-up toilet, she ignores all the signs of suburban hell and calls to Billy, "Never mind the way it is now. Think about the way it's going to look."

Mother-driven families (none of the "fathers said more than a few sentences a day to their children") live lives as similar as their houses. They all bake the same coconut cake, hang out laundry on the same day of the week and order dinette sets with laminated tops that look like wood but sponge off easily. Loving her children is not enough. To fit in, Nora would have to keep them up, along with the lawn, live a life as ordered as the ones around her and, most important, get a husband.

She does none of these things. In her tight black stretch pants she recklessly sleds down the hill with the baby and feeds him Frosted Flakes when the pot roast burns. She gets all dreamy eyed when she dances around the living room to her Elvis records. No one speaks to her at PTA meetings or buys her Tupperware -- except the husbands, who further enrage their wives by giving it to them on their birthdays. The janitor throws out her oversweet, marshmallow-laden offering to the bake sale.

After a few months of being snubbed, Nora is standing alone on her front porch on New Year's Eve in her black cocktail dress listening to the music from the neighborhood party, wondering where her life is going and whether she will ever be included in the circle of laughter. So masterly drawn is Nora that whenever her heart aches this way, so does ours.

Hoffman is also able to bring to life a complex supporting cast of characters in a few swift paragraphs. They travel from open hostility toward this stranger, to liking her despite her imperfections, to loving her because of them. The most complacent wife discovers that love can disappear, not overnight but in the course of a hundred tuna casseroles served every Friday. No one is immune from dissatisfaction and its companion, desire, which can be tamped down but comes back unannounced. "You might find it when you slipped your hand into a rubber glove to scour the kitchen sink, or in the wedges of pears sliced onto a plate for a baby's lunch." It hits Nora's neighbor Donna Durgin one day when she is "wounded by the kindness" of the Sears repairman, who doesn't charge her for fixing the washer because he can tell she really cares about things. "You wouldn't believe some of the laundry rooms I've seen," he says. Her husband has not said anything as kind for years; after she carefully lays out dinner and the next day's clothes for the kids, Donna walks out of his life forever.

Hoffman avoids the easy sentimentality of her last book, At Risk, the story of an 11-year-old who contracts AIDS through a blood transfusion. In Seventh Heaven, when a young girl dies accidentally after a group of high school boys cruelly take advantage of her, the sorrow does not really hit until a classmate cleaning out her parents' garage discovers the notebook she kept of each day's outfits and accessories, and a box of matching shoes, all shined.

Nora finally knows she has found a home in this unlikely suburb when Billy, who has been terrorized by the meanest third-grade bullies in modern literature, makes the Little League baseball team. It would be the tritest of endings if it did not, like every word in this stirring, stunning novel, ring absolutely true.