Not Quite Homed-In On A Small Town -- Tracy Kidder's Writing Flows Smoothly But His Winning Format Doesn't Adapt Easily To `Home Town'

------------------------------- "Home Town" by Tracy Kidder Random House, $25.95 -------------------------------

Some singers are so gifted that they could sing the phone book and still break your heart. Some writers are likewise so adept that they could make a phone book irresistible. Take Tracy Kidder.

Kidder has mastered the art of being a fly on the wall - a generous-hearted fly, that is, and skilled in describing what he sees. The idea is cast-iron simple: observe, at length, a single subject, often an unlikely one. Remove all traces of yourself, letting others speak. Then explore your subject's fundamental subtexts.

Kidder's "Home" ostensibly traced the building of a house from conception to finish, but also addressed the bedrock-basic concept of shelter. "Old Friends," about two men in a retirement home, explored issues of mortality and companionship.

"Among Schoolchildren," a year in an elementary classroom, was concerned with education and childhood. "The Soul of a New Machine," for which Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize, was about the race to complete a piece of computer technology - and about how technological advancement affects us.

An important theme running through all these books is that of human interaction and cooperation. This idea stands front and center in Kidder's new book, "Home Town," which describes several months in the life of Northampton, Mass.

Kidder does delve into the physical aspects and history of this pretty little town (Kidder lives in Western Massachusetts, where Northampton is located). We learn about its famous college for women, Smith, and about illustrious citizens like Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century preacher. But it is the people who are the real stars here - the phone book, so to speak, from the ebullient mayor to the most marginal inhabitants.

Kidder frames their individual (and often intertwining) tales with the story of a bullet-headed, likable policeman, Tommy O'Connor. O'Connor, who grew up in Northampton, has a great affection for the town. He ruminates at one point that he knows he's getting old when he has to roust the children of people he rousted when THEY were kids.

But O'Connor isn't old, and the personal problems he candidly reveals as the book unfolds are those of a relatively young man. He and his wife desperately want a child but can't conceive; he also flirts with the idea of abandoning life as a small-town cop in favor of the FBI.

In Kidder's sympathetic portrayal, these problems become compelling, as do those of O'Connor's lifelong friend and fellow cop, Rick Janacek (one of the few people in "Home Town" to appear under a pseudonym). During the course of the book, Janacek, an alcoholic, endures a wrenching trial; he's accused of sexually abusing his daughter during a blackout.

We also meet an attorney, once a dashing, driving force behind Northampton's economic prosperity, now reduced by Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder to wistfully observing life from a distance. And there's an immensely brave single mother, a scholarship student at Smith who must accept the humiliation of welfare.

Chapter by chapter, such stories are wonderfully involving. Unfortunately, "Home Town" suffers when looked at overall.

Kidder's books usually have built-in, beginning-to-end frameworks: a house is designed and built, a school year starts and finishes. But "Home Town" is a random snapshot of many evolving dramas, and it can't help being messy.

Kidder is aware of this. Early on, he writes:

"A great deal lay hidden and half-hidden in this small, peaceful town. Well before you understood all of it, you would feel you understood too much. . . . As places go, it seemed so orderly. But what an appalling abundance it contained. If all of the town were transparent, if the roofs came off all the buildings and the houses and the cars, and you were forced to look down and see in one broad sweep everything that had happened here and was happening . . . you'd be overcome before you turned away. And not just by malignancy and suffering, but by all the tenderness and joy, all the little acts of courage and kindness and simple competence and diligence operating all the time. To apprehend it all at once - who could stand it? No wonder so much remains invisible in towns."

Besides this incomplete-feeling structure, "Home Town" has another nagging problem for the average reader: the why-bother question. Northampton is clearly an interesting place, but what would make an outsider care enough to read a whole book about it?

One hefty answer, of course, is the pleasure of Kidder's graceful prose. But "Home Town" may frustrate readers looking for analysis or assessment: of the good and bad of small-town life, of Yankee values, of society as a whole.

So much for reservations. Even if the overall portrait of "Home Town" falls short, its portraits of the ordinary people listed in Northampton's phone book are still lovely.

Seattle writer Adam Woog's most recent book is a history of rock 'n' roll for young adults. His column on crime fiction appears on the second Sunday of the month in The Times. -------------------------------

Tracy Kidder will read from "Home Town" at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Kane Hall at the University of Washington. Sponsored by KUOW and the University Book Store. Information: 206-545-4365.