The Murky Waters of Middle Age : BEDROCK <i> by Lisa Alther (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 325 pp.; 0-394-57755-8) </i>

The hunger to see ourselves mirrored in fiction leads readers and reviewers alike to overestimate the literary value of novels that seem to catch the feel of the times. Lisa Alther’s engaging first novel, “Kinflicks” (1976), a ribald account of coming-of-age in the ‘60s, elicited accolades likening it to a female version of such classics as “Tom Jones,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Alther went on to make a creditably strong showing with her second book, “Original Sins” (1981), and continued to garner respectful reviews with “Other Women” (1984). I remember it well, because one of the respectful reviews was mine.

Alther’s fiction reflects a lot of what is new and different about the times we’ve been living through--or, at very least, a lot of what we perceive as new and different, whether or not it is so. As times change, and as her heroines get older, Alther continues to report back to us in novels that could well be classified as a fictionalized--and superior--form of sociology.

Her latest novel, “Bedrock,” gives us Clea Shawn, a sophisticated woman making her way through the murky waters of middle age. A strikingly attractive woman subject to impulsive, whirlwind love affairs, Clea is married to a man who also has flings when on business trips. Clea, long accustomed to a cosmopolitan life, suddenly decides to buy a house in a small Vermont town, much to the horror of her husband, children and close friend Elke, a German-born artist who at one point almost became Clea’s lover.

In the picturesque, pristine-looking town of Roches Ridge, Clea sees a setting for all the “bedrock” values. As she slowly discovers, however, Roches Ridge is merely a microcosm of the world she hoped to leave behind, featuring home-grown criminals, local farm boys who organize “gayrides,” a handsome hairdresser who models himself on Warren Beatty in “Shampoo,” a Lesbian New Age commune, a fundamentalist preacher who shrouds his womenfolk in veils while lusting after the beehive hairdo of the free-wheeling woman who owns the local greasy spoon, and, last but not least, Clea’s immediate neighbors, a degenerate family descended from the town founders, who live by trapping animals for food and salvaging designer clothing from the bodies of accident victims.

Although Clea’s impressions of the townfolks’ perception of her is often a source of humor and irony, and sometimes a way of providing insight and dimension, most of the time it is heavy-handed and needlessly repetitive. Essentially, what Alther is doing is juxtaposing contrasting sets of stereotypes, over and over. Neither the story nor the characters are interesting enough in the first place to bear retelling each incident and redescribing each character multiple times from various viewpoints.

“Bedrock” has its moments, though. A kind of thinking-woman’s Erica Jong, Alther has a knack for conveying the tempo of contemporary manners and mores, as in this brief passage: “In the midst of verbal maneuvers designed to elicit sexual histories so each could make an informed decision concerning the risk of fatal infection, Clea found herself yawning. For Jim at age thirty-two, an affair with an older woman was probably exciting, but for Clea, even excitement had become boring.”

But like Clea, Alther seems to be losing her touch. Contemplating the carnage of Elke’s European childhood, Clea asks her European man of the moment why “men seem to have this need to live in tents and kill each other?” His wise old European reply to her innocent American question--”Perhaps if you were circumcised as a baby without an anesthetic, you would want to kill too”--makes very little sense, humorous or otherwise, in view of the fact that during the period in question, most of the circumcised male population of Europe was being herded into death camps by the uncircumcised majority.