Exorcising the Emotional Specters of a Life : A TRUCE WITH TIME: A Love Story With Occasional Ghosts<i> by Parke Godwin : (Bantam Books: $16.95; 310 pp.)</i>

In this often filling, sometimes frustrating novel, 50-year-old Pat Landry, a successful genre novelist (fantasy, science fiction), is haunted. Not by pale specters, but by his dead and very talkative family--mother, father, older half-brother and half-sister, and the ghost of his still living, estranged younger brother--who crowd his kitchen, kibitz at parties, materialize (to his eyes only) at odd, emotionally apt moments to fight again their lifelong wars with him and with each other.

Since Landry is already battling full-tilt against his own midlife crises--alcoholism, writer’s doubts, loneliness--this Greek-vaudeville chorus turns a few more screws, commenting acidly on his shaky steps into a new love relationship and a possible new writing direction. No modern minimalist fiction this; we are dealing with the great intertwining themes of family and time. Characters are heard hotly spilling their psyches through a plot that begins, middles, and ends--the stuff of O’Neill and Ibsen, if spooned up with a lighter hand.

Due to Godwin’s considerable narrative skill, we know always where we are and who is talking, not easy when family members keep reappearing at different ages from different decades of their lives. By telling a traditional tale in an untraditional way, Godwin has created an often funny, occasionally moving drama of what it really means to be haunted by a family’s past; the dead here spring paradoxically to life.

More life I’m afraid than many in Landry’s “real” New York world of writers, agents and artists--glib types with overarticulated neuroses cutely and endlessly hashed. Even the central love relationship seems less vital than old loves re-examined. And when all the plot lines become ribbons tying up Landry’s messy laundry into packaged resolutions one after another, I drew back, disbelieving, after believing Landry’s final laying to rest of his family (in a beautifully controlled series of star-turns). Escaping genre writing (if that’s what Godwin/Landry wants to do) doesn’t only mean writing different books, it means writing and resolving them differently, less neatly and predictably.