WEAK HEARTS

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

It is early summer in a nameless Connecticut hamlet, and the Irises are wilting. Like the members of so many families who inhabit the world of contemporary fiction, those in the Iris clan are profoundly disconnected from one another. When we meet them in Angel Angel (Viking; 211 pages; $19.95), April Stevens' intelligent and moving first novel, they seem withered by their inability to achieve the closeness they yearn for.

The story begins as Augusta Iris decides to take to her bed indefinitely. Her husband has left her for another woman, and she is exhausted not only from the pain of his abandonment but also from a lifetime of unfulfilled desire. It is a challenge to portray a forsaken woman in a way that evokes genuine sympathy; but Stevens manages, conveying Augusta's sadness with a knowing honesty reminiscent of Edna O'Brien. Augusta cannot bear thoughts of her husband's existing in the world without her. "It was the fact that he wasn't dead that worked me like a pin on a balloon," she says, "stabbing me and leaving me airless. Flat out."

Angel Angel is told from the alternating points of view of Augusta and her two twentyish sons Mathew and Henry, aimless young men who want to rouse their mother out of her torpor but haven't the emotional strength. It will take an outsider to revive this troubled lot, and she arrives in the form of Bette Mack, a taciturn beauty in pink sneakers as drawn to the Irises as they are to her. Stevens surrounds Bette with an excess of winged imagery to indicate that she is the savior who will lift the Irises from their aggrieved inertia. The author has not realized Bette as thoughtfully as she has the other characters, and the reader never fully understands what it is about this girl that so deeply touches the Iris family. But angels are supposed to be a mysterious breed, and despite these flaws, Stevens has made a fine debut.