The Anomie Farm : ROOTIE KAZOOTIE <i> by Lawrence Naumoff (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18.95; 262 pp.) </i>

In this second novel (his first was “The Night of the Weeping Women”), Lawrence Naumoff attempts a satire--or so it seems--of the moral unrootedness and consequent marital vagaries of domestic modern life. The trouble is that in order to write about lives in a morally shallow world, Naumoff has summoned up a cast of equally shallow characters, none of whom, except now and then as if by fleeting accident, lays claim to a reader’s affections. The result is an oddly wooden, half-hearted, artificial novel that looks in vain for a heart to give it the pulse of life.

Caroline and Richard, childless and in their late 30s, have been married for 14 years, living in a small house in rural North Carolina on the patch of land that they had once idealistically thought could become their own self-sustaining Eden. As the novel opens, however, things aren’t going so well. Caroline has begun to get on the laconic Richard’s nerves (she talks far too much, as against his far too little), and Richard himself has fallen into the clutches (as yet without consummation) of Cynthia, a rich and glamorous divorcee down the road.

The engaging comedy of manners and morals that might ensue--as Richard at last leaves Caroline, as Caroline goes on a jealous rampage in response, as things flare hot and then grow depressingly chilly between Richard and Cynthia--is jeopardized from the outset by Naumoff’s telltale shortcuts and vain efforts to give depth and background to his surface-only characters.

Disconcertingly often, for example, he falls into a vacuously hastened language that characterizes only in the broadest of cartoon strokes--as when he explains in hurried telegraph-ese that Cynthia “had . . . felt a strange homesick longing and kinship to (Richard’s) simple way of life and his quiet style,” that she had “called Richard and . . . pow, she was just knocked over, completely and totally knocked over,” and, lest one continues (as one does) to doubt, that “She was truly crazy about him.”

Fruitful dramatic comedy needs something at its center, and one assumes early on that the center in this novel is to be the figure of the abandoned Caroline, who is wronged both by the ersatz-minded Cynthia and by the seldom-talking and apparently hunkish Richard.

And yet Caroline, too, although the only one here capable of demonstrating either humor or passion, is treated with equally damaging effect to Naumoff’s get-it-over-with-quickly characterization: “Caroline taught first grade and she loved her children and they loved her. Lately, though, . . . all the paperwork and the bureaucracy and so forth . . . had begun to get her down.” Such flurries of dead phrases, here as so often elsewhere in the book, reveal Naumoff skimming in an unthinking, pell-mell shorthand across his material in order to get--where?

What a reader gradually comes to realize is that, in fact, there’s no place for Naumoff finally to get at all, since the inside of his characters, if they have an inside at all, is a world that seems wholly closed to him. In the middle of the book, Caroline follows an apparently stray dog deep into the woods, where she comes upon a rustic cabin inhabited by a beautifully perfect young man and a beautifully perfect young woman (and, of course, by their dog. Says Caroline: “I love your dog, though. He’s really special”).

The cabin, of course, symbolizes the Eden that Caroline and Richard are said to have dreamed of once, a self-sufficient, pure, untroubled world of two. And in this symbolic center-point of the book, if anywhere, one could fairly expect the inner substance and stabilizing verities of Caroline’s true self to be revealed. What one discovers, though, are just trivial inanities expressed in language to match.

To the questioning of her rustic but advertisement-perfect hosts, Caroline says, “Actually, I feel really great now. Really. Just sitting here in this beautiful house is making me feel really, really good.” At bedtime (she stays overnight), she explains that “It’s so quiet and so really special out there I’d just like to sleep in the yard.”

As if aware of the inward poverty of his characters and of their consequent dramatic inertia, Naumoff reaches clumsily for authorial intensifiers and fillers of various sorts: “Who could know, who could ever have guessed that long ago this handsome man and these two gorgeous women . . . would later find themselves stuck in the time warp of the broken life . . . “ Or, somewhat more grammatically: “Had a team of scientists examined this twentieth-century couple, how much could they possibly have discovered about them?”

Sadly, the last question answers itself: not much, indeed.

Stirring this novel-stew of cut-outs and surfaces as best he can, Naumoff resolves things at last with a comic coincidence that will surprise no one, a medical deus ex machina and a country homily. Along the way, Caroline provides some briefly raucous farce while driving a tractor and wearing a piece of “Cynthia’s new lingerie on her head”; Cynthia’s teen-aged children parade their materialism; the craven Cynthia demonstrates the depths of her intellect (“You have to be loved and you have to give love, and when you do that, all of the rest of the good follows. I’ve thought a lot about it”), and Richard gives one of his longer speeches (“It’s just everything, okay?”).

What keeps this novel, finally, from coming to life is not its lack of ambition--it endeavors to take on, at one point or another, all kinds of targets--but instead its own peculiar lack of a real substance. “Times had changed,” writes Naumoff. “People had changed. What was once wrong might no longer be wrong. Things had been lost. Reasons for acting or thinking in a certain way had been lost. The sense of absolute right and wrong had failed. People tried to do their best, but no one was sure anymore.”

But that’s not a convincing apologia, itself falling into yet another authorial cliche, and one furthermore unconnected to the characters in the book, who in fact aren’t particularly bothered by questions of that sort.

“It’s hard to figure out,” Naumoff writes yet again. “Some of the best-looking women ended up with these guys you wouldn’t have thought they’d look at twice. You saw it and it made you think.” If, one might ask, that really could be called thinking, or perception.