American Loneliness Syndrome : LOSS OF FLIGHT <i> by Sara Vogan (Bantam New Fiction: $7.95</i> , <i> trade paperback; 432 pp.) </i>

If psychotherapists are indeed battling the clergy for the role of spiritual guide in modern life, then the first territories to fall will be such secular and sin-infested places as San Francisco. This is the setting of Sara Vogan’s second novel, “Loss of Flight.”

Here the services of Dr. Max Bodine, an unorthodox psychiatrist, are in great demand. Bodine meets his patients on the golf course or at the zoo for four-hour stretches, on the theory that this allows them to open up more easily. Not only that, but he always gets “involved with his patients too quickly, too personally.” You wish you could call him up for an appointment.

Bodine’s help is sought by Royce Chambers, a married man who for the last two years has been dividing his time between his Sausalito family and his San Francisco girlfriend, Katlyn Whiston.

A leggy, red-haired fashion designer, Katlyn was devastated when her husband left her for Guerrero, their gay travel agent. Katlyn then took up with Royce, reasoning somewhat obtusely that a married man was “safe.” But after two years of being alone on weekends and holidays, the arrangement has worn thin for her.

Although Royce protests that his father-in-law, who owns Royce’s printing business, will ruin him financially if he gets a divorce, Katlyn gives Royce a one-week deadline to choose between her and Irene, the frigid wife in Marin County.

Royce does what any red-blooded American male does in the ‘80s: He calls a shrink. Enter Bodine. At their first session (on the deck of a friend’s boat), Royce asks the doctor to provide him with some guarantee that if he leaves his wife and loses his business for Katlyn, that Katlyn won’t turn around and run out on him. “I’ve been pretty spineless up to now,” Royce confesses.

Bodine wants “to be part of a love story with a happy ending,” but, of course, he can’t promise one for Royce.

What follows instead is a week of uncertainty. In well-crafted and subtle prose, Vogan documents the characters’ lives almost moment by moment. We learn that Katlyn, Royce and Bodine are not alone in their unhappiness: Royce’s friend Frank was forced to flee to Hong Kong to escape his suffocating marriage; Katlyn’s friend Jody, married and with a child, dreams of being reunited for a passionate affair with the biochemist who left her 14 years ago.

Bodine has a name for his syndrome: American loneliness. As one of his patients, an Ethiopian woman, describes it, we in America are “perishing from a blessing”; the surfeit of wealth has made priorities hard to set. “Complaining is a luxury of the Western world,” she observes.

Bodine himself is a psychiatrist in the tradition of the wounded healer: He’s still haunted by the suicide of his sister, which drove him both to the practice of psychiatry and into the arms of Patrice. Now, as Ex-Wife From Hell, Patrice’s latest trick has been to send him a package of his clothes--in shreds.

The book, unfortunately, is flawed by some overly talky scenes in which the characters reflect at too-great length about the current state of their relationships. Cumulatively, these reflections do lead to a sense that even the deepest love is imperfect, whether between man and woman, parent and child, or even psychiatrist and patient.

But neither Katlyn nor Royce is particularly likable, and their love is dominated by selfishness. Katlyn never exhibits any remorse, or even ambivalence, about her adulterous involvement; she never even briefly considers, for example, her lover’s involvement; she never even briefly considers her lover’s children. Royce’s only fear is losing his business; he rationalizes that his children, at 16 and 13, don’t need him anymore.

To make matters even easier on Katlyn and Royce, Irene is a stereotype of what every mistress wants her lover’s wife to be: materialistic, manipulative, and concerned only with appearances.

Bodine is the exception in this narcissistic cast. He suffers nobly, and at the end, we are happy to see that Katlyn and Royce have had as much of a healing influence on him as he has had on them. The fact that he remains somewhat of an outsider is part of his charm; he’s definitely someone you’d want to confide in, whether in his office or at the zoo.