Stinking Drunk, and in Front of the Kids : THE MUSIC ROOM <i> by Dennis McFarland (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95; 265 pp.) </i>

The phrase dysfunctional family rolls trippingly off the tongue nowadays, summoning up a wealth of damage, anger and confusion, yet seeming somehow to compress all the pain into a neatly manageable category.

Dysfunction can range from extreme cases of child abuse of the sort that horrify hardened police officers, to the kinds of emotional neglect that are so commonplace as to seem almost endemic: parents who refuse to be--or who are unable to be--parents; bad marriages in which children become the victims; families in which attention and affection are short-circuited by dependence on drugs or alcohol--each unhappy family, as Tolstoy put it, unhappy in its own special way. Yet, certain patterns do emerge, which, pace Tolstoy, give the stories--and case histories--of dysfunctional families something of a familiar ring to the postmodern, therapy-trained ear.

Dennis McFarland’s first novel (part of which first appeared, in slightly different form, in the New Yorker) deals with a classically dysfunctional family, yet manages to state the obvious without sounding cliched. The mother, a former Las Vegas showgirl, spends her afternoons in a drunken haze, aided and abetted by a pair of boozing buddies. The father, scion of a wealthy, alcoholic Virginia family, withdraws into his music room, where he spends his days quietly imbibing oblivion and brooding over his failure to attempt--let alone achieve--his dream of a musical career. Martin and Perry, the two sons, born four years apart, share similar experiences growing up in this milieu, but certain differences of temperament give each a subtly and significantly different perspective on those experiences.

The novel opens in 1976, when Martin Lambert, nearly 30, head of a small San Francisco record company, is summoned East by a phone call from the New York City police notifying him of his younger brother’s suicide. Trying to cope with the shock of Perry’s death, searching for reasons that might explain it, Martin is plunged into a dazed, dreamlike state, in which lost memories resurface and the past slowly acquires shape, color and weight.

Martin is further agitated by meeting up with a sympathetic and attractive woman named Jane Owlcaster, Perry’s lover before the break-up in their relationship that occurred shortly before his death. Jane, like everyone else in Perry’s life, is initially stunned by Martin’s physical resemblance to his brother. She and Martin sense the dangers of falling in love with each other, yet they also sense the possibility of consolation and renewal in such a relationship sometime in the indefinite future.

Pondering Perry’s death, Martin can find no single immediate cause that triggered his leap from a hotel window. Yet underlying causes seem scattered like combustible materials throughout Perry’s childhood--and his own: alcoholic parents locked in a cool, yet deadly stand-off of disappointment and recrimination; a wife whose contempt for her husband turns his life into a kind of slow suicide. The desperation of the situation is disguised by the seeming ordinariness of their squabbling:

“Father finds Mother in the library playing solitaire . . . cursing the cards under her breath, cigarette hanging from her lips, its ash about to drop. ‘You’re drunk ,’ he says to her from the doorway, disgusted. ‘You’re drunk ,’ Mother says to Father in the music room as he lies on the couch staring at the ceiling. . . . In the entryway, gripping her braceleted wrists--is she about to hit him?--he says to her (a harsh whisper, for there are guests in the library), ‘You’re drunk .’ Long before I knew what the word meant, I identified it as the meanest thing they said to each other. And when I finally knew that it was what you got from drinking whisky, it seemed a very strange thing to accuse each other of, since they were always drinking whisky.”

As Martin struggles to extricate himself from his family’s ill-fated tendencies, he comes to see that his parents’ marriage was even worse than he knew. Only Perry, who was less of an onlooker, more of an emotionally involved participant, had a clear view of it all, and this clarity of vision may well have contributed to his suicide. But Martin, unlike Perry, recognizes the part played by alcohol in exacerbating the family’s problems.

Baldly summarized, the story sounds like an Alcoholics Anonymous parable. As handled by McFarland, it is something more. He is too sensitive a writer to hit us over the head with the obvious: Even when they seem to exemplify casebook histories, his characters retain a measure of mystery that lends dimension.

It would be fair to say that this is a reasonably “faultless” first novel, carefully observed, self-scrutinizing without excessive self-consciousness, and written so seamlessly that you don’t really notice the writing. Is it also fair to criticize a novel for being somehow too perfect? McFarland’s professional polish seems less a personal trait than a characteristic acquired from repeated and prolonged immersion in professional writing programs. The well-tempered but undistinctive style of his writing is suitable enough, but one suspects it would suit almost any other young novelist just as well.

For all its virtues, “The Music Room” remains a novel that inspires appreciation and respect rather than astonishment and delight. Pace the hyperbolic publicity material, it is hardly (and I quote the encomium by storyteller Frank Conroy) “the kind of book you press into people’s hands telling them if they don’t read it you’ll never speak to them again.”

Insofar as one’s friends may have qualities that make them irreplaceable, and this novel, though valuable, does not, I, for one, would think twice before presenting them with the alternative.