THE EVENING WOLVES <i> by Joan Chase (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18.95; 280 pp.) </i>

“A portrait in voices of (a) nuclear and lopsided family. The nucleus is unstable and radioactive. The voices are clicks on a Geiger counter. . . . Joan Chase is the Enrico Fermi of domestic subatomics; that is, of the woman’s part.”