NATURAL HISTORY

James Bray, a Hollywood actor looking for some kind of meaningful resurrection, is drawn back to his Bridgeport, Connecticut, home in search of animating memories of his hard-working detective father and a frustrating murder case he lost during the war—a case involving a socialite and a soldier. Meanwhile, James's sister Catherine, a Time-Life editor tired of the evanescent sameness of yet another married-man-affair in a Village apartment, has already returned to Bridgeport to become a successful weaver, living low-profile in a house she shares with a virgin ex-nun social worker, Mary Boyle. James hardly knows what he wants from Bridgeport—but at least will discover that what he wants from life, in general, is something he's probably already tasted. Howard (Expensive Habits, 1986; Grace Abounding, 1982, etc.), one of the most intelligent and careful of American novelists, has dipped into the narrative-oddity-bag for this one, however. She tells the story anywhichway but straight: through film-like montage techniques; impacted italics; a section dubbed ``double-entry bookkeeping,'' in which left-hand pages comment on or diverge from the story on the right. It's a job, in fact, simply to punch air-holes into Howard's ever-more crabbed paragraphs (``Wool pulled over our eyes and we love it. Big shadow of James, his grandiose gestures. I been telling true. How it came to pass I went into the eternal Cal. light, got my ass out of the swell chair—no knockoff- -out of the swell room'') and figure out what a character is saying. The Bray dignity that is the family's chief mark is always submerged in the muddy shallows of the stylistics; how palpable and real both James and Catherine are must finally be guessed at, rather than sensually appreciated. Puzzlingly self-defeating.