The Mind of the Failed Father : MR. FIELD’S DAUGHTER <i> by Richard Bausch (Linden Press: $18.95; 326 pp.) </i>

Strong characters sustain a family story line as a gifted novelist mines the universal in a pit of the mundane.

Richard Bausch could have lathered up a soap opera from this father-daughter tale of James and Annie Field. James, a widower, lives in Duluth and works at the local bank, and he tipples a little too often while attempting to be parent, provider and protector. Annie is an otherwise intelligent young woman who opts to run out on her father in favor of life with Cole Gilbertson, the nearest handsome, drug-abusing dropout. The father fails for having tried too hard; Annie makes a horrendous wrong choice. In less-skilled hands such missed connections are the sort of anguish that sells mouthwash on noontime television.

Bausch might have carved a mere thriller out of the same material. The wounded father pursues his runaway daughter and only humiliates himself. Years later, villain Gilbertson is the chaser, stalking both father and daughter because Annie has run back to Duluth with her own young child. Gilbertson is violent and unbalanced, so pathological the reader knows grisly things are about to happen. Of course Cole eventually totes a gun--everyone who has ever rented an R-rated cassette could have told you that.

What is unexpected is the author’s ability to crawl inside the skulls of his performers, including monster Gilbertson. This technique, writing through the sensibilities of several characters, is generally frowned upon by teachers, editors and publishers. The novelist is trained to present one point of view, selecting one narrator as the storyteller--usually adopting either the first-person or third-person voice. The “omniscient” narrator who sees all things at all times from all perspectives is considered bad form, supposedly because the reader needs a constant reference and because each life, each human backside, can only be in one place at a time.

Yet Bausch does not so much break rules as break impediments to understanding. Instead of explaining his characters through the narrator or just allowing them exterior dialogue, he moves inside to let them explain themselves.

By putting words inside Gilbertson’s mouth, a loathsome villain comes alive: “ . . . those people who drove to work early and came home late and watched television and were anxious about bills, insurance, savings accounts, the yearly vacation, going to church and having children--it had always seemed to him that such things were part of some big lie.” None of that is profound; it simply flows against the mainstream of Middle- American thought. But if only given Gilbertson’s actions--or others’ perspectives on those actions--the reader would have few cues to realize that even evil creatures have fairly ordinary responses to reality. Giving Gilbertson voice makes him a person, however self-justifying and self-deluding.

James Field’s voice echoes the complaint of parents everywhere who practiced love and control and kindness and concern--to wind up feeling rejection: “I’ve had trouble being patient sometimes, and sometimes I’ve probably been too patient. I did some things to enforce my will when I thought it had to be enforced, for her safety and well-being. I tried to be a friend to her, when that was called for and, a lot of the time, probably when it was not. I listened to her as much as I could, and I think I did as well as anyone does under the circumstances. . . . It was like everything I’d tried to teach her and everything we’d been to each other--it just all--it--none of it mattered.” None of that is profound, either; what it has is the overtone of truth and the whine of all adults who feel responsible while lacking the talent to let go.

Annie understood that much: “He made mistakes, like anyone, and they were all the mistakes of wanting more than he could have: perfection, a fatherhood that obliterated the possibilities for unhappiness, misunderstanding, unintentional cruelty, failure. He worked at it and I grew up resisting him at every turn, almost as though that were what I had been assigned to do in the world.” What Annie learned much later was the way a wrong escape route may lead to another form of imprisonment.

Other characters have lives and lines. Young Linda, Annie’s own precocious daughter, embraces long words and tries to figure out why her parents came apart. Middle-aged Louis Wolfe courts Annie and tries to provide the kind of comfort she once rejected from her father. Selena Gilbertson, Cole’s mother, regularly writes to television actors because she can’t communicate with her son. Loneliness or aloneness is what all of them seem to be about, and Bausch people, conformists and crazies, become remarkably recognizable as they speak--plain, in pain--about themselves.

Even as Cole Gilbertson blunders along on his violent business, the suspense of this novel is when or whether any of these people can figure out the way to give love and--harder--how to receive it.