A House of Her Own : A STRANGER’S HOUSE<i> by Bret Lott (Viking Press: $17.95; 256 pp.) </i>

The trauma of infertility, the Angst of childhood, inherited insanity--these are the powerful subjects of Bret Lott’s second novel, “A Stranger’s House.” As in “The Man Who Owned Vermont,” his widely acclaimed first work of fiction, he once again depicts a young couple who struggle with difficulties in their marriage and ultimately manage to reunite by overcoming their own personal isolation.

Having at last saved enough to buy their first home, Tom and Claire Templeton find a “handyman’s special” in a remote Massachusetts town, surrounded by the beauty of open spaces; eagerly they begin to rebuild and make it their own. Tom, a newspaperman, is inquisitive, sensitive, likable, while the complex, moody Claire narrates in the first person to set the novel’s tone. In her job at a neuroscience and behavior lab, she conditions rabbits with electric shock and then sacrifices them to examine their brains; one day she lapses from her usual precision and is bitten (ironically) by a pregnant rabbit. After this, she begins to succumb to increasing internal turmoil and alienation from friends, co-workers, her husband and, finally, the world.

Quitting her job, she tries to ignore her growing isolation by working on their new home. She tears down a rotted porch to discover hidden symmetry in a set of stone steps leading up into the house, and so begins a perilous journey into herself and her past. The house itself is a multifaceted symbol: It is the empty womb, as well as--and more interestingly--a place already crowded with the troubled ghosts of the former family. Claire and Tom unknowingly inherit these persistent specters when, to help with the renovation, they hire those who summon them forth--the teen-ager, Martin, and the retarded man, Grady, two townies who turn out to be mysteriously related to the seller of the house.

But Claire is also pursuing her own ghosts: those of the unattainable children and of her parents, as well--her father, killed in a freak accident when she was 11, and her mother, who died alone, a few years back. Claire mourns her barrenness openly each time she passes a playground, a pregnant woman, or a maternity ward. But the mourning for her parents is secret, and therefore dangerous--simply because she refuses either to recognize or resolve it. All her life she has waited for her father to return, to tell her who she will be, to protect her from becoming like her mother--who was crippled by agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and who, by the time she died, had reduced herself to living in one small room. This claustrophobic legacy of fear is the novel’s immensely successful, emotional pivot: “I wondered if, as I grew older, I weren’t becoming my mother, more like her each day, more turned into myself.” When Claire moves from the structured life of the laboratory to the open space of the new house, her memories, thoughts and emotions begin to spiral inward, her disorientation heightens, as does her profound inability to resolve her parents’ lives or deaths. She runs in fear from what lies behind her, and this is the most moving, convincing part of the story.

Conversely, Lott is at his weakest and most self-conscious when he tries to elucidate from the woman’s perspective experiences exclusively female--such as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth or lactation. Passages freighted with too many adjectives, too much clinical terminology, as well as small inaccuracies, indicate that he is on unfamiliar terrain; what a contrast to the lyrical descriptions of Claire and Tom rebuilding, or Claire dissecting rabbits, or the New England countryside, and especially the brilliant characterization of the retarded Grady and his limited world.

Despite the novel’s tendency to dip a bit into melodrama, interior revelations keep the reader intrigued, especially the conflicting stories spun by Grady about the house’s former inhabitants. This history is initially so confusing (and annoying) that we need a genealogy to keep everyone straight. Then, quite suddenly, in a brilliant twist, Lott’s purpose comes clear: As Grady rewrites the story of his people (as though he were authoring different drafts of a novel), the reader is forced to recognize that relationships within a troubled family are often just like this--full of half-truths and betrayals, hate masquerading as love, and even cruelty between those linked solely through birth and often not separable even through death.

The perfect family life that Claire longs for is a counterpoint to the tragic one she inherits through Martin and Grady: Ultimately this stranger’s house is all too much like the one she grew up in; she discovers her idealization of a new family is only a defense against her own bitter past. In the end, all stories, like Grady’s or Claire’s, are merely ways of coming to terms with life: “embellishments,” as the author says, “embroidering upon simple facts until the story lived in us, breathed, and kept us remembering, fiction becoming more real than any truth of the matter could be.” “A Stranger’s House” lives, breathes--and is indeed breathtakingly real.