BOOK REVIEW : Novel of Regrets Fails to Ring True : OUR HAPPINESS <i> by Tom Jenks</i> Bantam $17.95 cloth, $7.95 paper; 192 pages

“Time changes everything,” as the rueful old Bob Wills tune had it. The same refrain runs through “Our Happiness” from literally its opening line onward. This first novel has time on its mind, specifically the havoc that memory can wreak on the present, and vice versa. Its plot rests on that staple of Southern fictions--a dark secret.

Narrated in the first person by a character named Carl Freeman, the novel begins in contemporary Manhattan and is related in the present tense. Freeman is married to Kath, has a little preschool boy named Owen, and is a real-estate developer of some apparent notoriety. On the first page he tells us, somewhat solemnly, that he is not a liar or a thief, that he has helped people and been faithful to Kath. But then a few pages later he says, “At night I sweat and grind my teeth. I wake up damp and limp and hearing the chalky sound of my teeth.” To find out why, we jump to a separate story told in the past tense: It takes place 10 years before the New York setting, back when Freeman had a tumbledown farm somewhere in the hardscrabble hill ‘n’ holler country of the South. Remembered in nostalgic, almost Edenic terms, this was back when he “worked construction and drove an old pickup I’d paid too much for,” when he had maladept social adventures with the local folks when he met and wooed Kath. The two different story lines that alternate throughout the book according to no discernible formal patterns are established within the first 10 pages, and are interleaved with pained rumination on the nature of time. Thus while Freeman says of his boy, “My son doesn’t tell time by the clock. He wakes, the sun rises, we share a continuity of days . . . ,” of himself he notes, “I’d like to repair time . . . Where once I felt a continuity . . . as soft and slow as the long black sweep of the second hand on a clock . . . more and more often comes a feelinglessness that is not quite death.”

At the end of this short first chapter we get the reason for Freeman’s damaged sense of time and why it contrasts so unhappily with the innocence of his son’s perception: “Owen does not know and will not. . . that I killed a man.”

By dropping a bomb this portentous so early on, author Tom Jenks sets himself a daunting task. The farm narrative will require a really good, taut story line to avoid anti-climax--information carefully paid out to make the murder seem the inevitable outcome of either circumstance or character. At the same time, the city story must subtly limn the spiritual cost of the murder’s aftermath if any measure of tragedy is to be found in it.

I’m sorry to say he’s not up to it on either count. Down on the farm, country life is presented in vignettes so fuzzy-edged they border on cliche. There is a haying scene, a scene of cruelty to animals, and a party sequence replete with banjo and guitar; there is much drinking and dope-smoking throughout all of it told in the nostalgic tones of temps perdu .

Before the killing finally occurs, the narrator gives us periodic reminders of it, which is a good thing because when it does happen it is random and more than a little pathetic involving a character we haven’t even met.

Back in the present tense, there is possibly even less narrative coherence and direction. The most extended scene revolves around Carl and Kath’s anxieties about getting Owen into the “right” preschool, which serves as pretext for some muddled thoughts about class and how maybe they don’t fit in that well here either.

Too much of this book simply doesn’t ring true. It reads like undigested experience material that has not yet been imagined into fiction. The best writing in the book is lost behind the hoked-up narrative devices. It’s as though the author, who happens to be a literary editor himself, has given his novel the structure of regrets but left out the substance.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries” by Kaylie Jones (Bantam).

Richard Eder is on vacation.