FICTION : CROOKED HEARTS by Robert Boswell (Knopf: $17.95; 340 pp.).

Robert Boswell, author of an award-winning short fiction, “Dancing in the Movies,” doesn’t set a foot wrong in the writing of this first novel.

The title comes from W. H. Auden’s “As I walked Out One Evening,” about how time cracks love’s illusions. The illusions of the Warren family of Yuma, Ariz.--Jill and Edward, married 30 years, and their four mostly grown children--are cracking mightily at the time of this story. Edward has been demoted from teaching history to driver training after a fling with one of his students and is helpless to comprehend the contempt and anger of his most-loved oldest child, Charley. Second son Tom has just come home numbed by his failure after one semester at Berkeley. The third son, Ask, 17, holds the family together with his sweet nature and the memories and rituals they share, and 15-year-old Cassie tries to figure out life and her brothers.

The Warrens have always thumbed their noses at failure. When Ask’s volcano blew up and broke his arm at the school science fair, when Cassie froze onstage in the sixth-grade play, even when Edward was caught with the high school girl, the Warrens put up Christmas lights and balloons, ordered cold cuts, made fancy drinks, broke out the records and danced.

But how can they keep this up when, at the party for Tom’s non-triumphant return from Berkeley, Charley throws a beer bottle through the kitchen window and stalks out of the house?

Boswell reveals the workings of a family through small moments--Edward at the crack in the front room drapes watching for hours for his son to return; Tom bewildered--was home like this before he crossed that gulf to Berkeley and back? Nothing’s wrong, says Ask, smiling, taping cardboard over the hole in the glass.

The smashed window is a prelude as the family’s troubles escalate. A son like Charley, emotionally ensnared and furious, unable to break away without quite literally destroying the ties that bind, is a shocking figure, but not an unfamiliar one. Tragedy strikes from outside the Warren family as well, and there, too, their best attempts to mend the cracks are as good as Ask’s cardboard on the window--but Boswell reminds us that sometimes that is the best we can do, and maybe it is not so bad.