Weaving a Picture of a Small Town : AUGUST HEAT <i> by Beth Lordan (Harper & Row: $16.95; 256 pp.) </i>

“All down the winding length of River Street, the invisible women are hanging out the wash, filling the sweet morning with the skreek-skreek of their clothesline pulleys and the high faint smell of bleach. . . .”

Beth Lordan opens her first novel, “August Heat,” with this description. It goes on.

”. . . Diapers, housedresses, starched white shirts, chinos and dress pants and gray work pants and dungarees on stretchers; Sunday dresses, undershirts, slips and petticoats; blouses, nightgowns, socks sorted and unsorted. . . .”

And it goes on. . . .

”. . . Underpants of every style and every size, corduroy overalls two feet long, girdles; throw rugs, dishcloths, tablecloths, tea towels, dresser scarves, bath mats, dust mop heads, slipcovers. . . .”

Sentence by sentence by sentence until the word sentence carries both its meanings, Lordan lists, numbers, names, tabulates, elucidates, enumerates, illustrates. . . .

She’s up to something here. This piling on of every tiny detail, each one as insistent as a June bug against a screen door, as a fly caught by a window, as a wasp up near the bedroom ceiling, as a . . . .

You get the picture--and that is Lordan’s point. Using a form of literary pointillism, or perhaps petit-point, she’s giving us the picture. She stitches a sour, dyspeptic “Our Town.”

We are in a small American town in the dead of summer. Nothing much happens but no matter. To Lordan’s writerly eye, nothing much is not nothing. Nothing is too small, too secret, too petty to be mentioned . . . and so it is. Detail piles upon detail like, well, laundry.

In many ways, family laundry and the joys of airing it are the precise concerns of “August Heat.” In a small town, full of small people, Jacob Wilcox is the village madman. His mutterings and mumblings, his rantings and ravings, his comings and goings, give his fellow townspeople something to talk about, something to think about and something they can’t control--and so fear.

When his sister Rachel, newly widowed, returns home bent on retrieving Jacob into her life--her city life--she imagines herself to be doing him a splendid favor. He, after all, is crazy. She is sane, quite sane, thank you. Which is why she can handle him.

Of course, she can’t.

Jacob, like a great many men sane or crazy, does not take well to “being handled.” Rachel, like a great many women, so sane that they’re crazy, does not take well to being defied. Female management and male passive-aggressive rebellion are traits that Rachel and her brother seem to share with every man and woman in tow.

Maybe it’s something in the water.

”. . . Less than five minutes since the first of the women slipped her shoes off her swollen feet in the dark bedroom, all these husbands and all these wives have betrayed one another and themselves. . . .”

“August Heat” is meant to be a claustrophobic book. It is intended to produce its effect through accretion, through the slow seeping of damp discomfort relieved for the reader, as for the townspeople, only by summer storms.

In its way, “August Heat” is an acutely sensual novel. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell--all are well, if not pleasantly, represented. Like the “faint high smell of bleach,” Lordan’s details may pinch the reader’s nostrils.

“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” small-town mothers once advised their children.

“What will the neighbors think!” they also exclaimed. In Lordan’s small town, characters worry a great deal about what the neighbors think. They can’t seem to find anything nice to say, and so they seldom say anything at all. Instead, they hint, insinuate, imply, wonder. . . . What they will not do is communicate with one another. “Speak English, for God’s sake!” one feels like snapping at them.

Unable to speak to each other, Lordan’s characters commune with nature instead. Perhaps, like many small-town American children, they were schooled on “Thanatopsis,” reciting dutifully:

To him who in the love of nature

Holds communion with her

visible forms,

She speaks a various

language. . . .

To Lordan’s ear--and eye--nature, at least, “speaks a various language.” The only truly open-hearted passages in the book deal with Jacob’s love of nature. Lordan clearly shares it. Writing of the natural world, her prose is as good, as fresh, as the first mowing. It is only human nature that puts her off.

As much as anything, it is a problem of scale. Envisioning God, delightfully, as a “giant beekeeper,” we humans, inevitably, are the creatures that sting. She shares with Thoreau and Annie Dillard, her contemporary, a naturalist’s eye, a theologian’s soul and a misanthrope’s heart. Broken?

Lordan is a fine writer--but perhaps, too fine. Increasingly, American writing divides itself between “serious writing” and “the other kind.” The gap between the two seems to be widening--to nobody’s good. A short-story writer whose work has appeared in “The Atlantic,” the winner of prestigious awards and grants, Lordan clearly eschews the potboiler. This is not entirely to her purposes. In prose, as in cooking, anything passed through too fine a net may seem thin, overstrained.

Lordan could have used some plot, thickening.