Happiness on Hemlock Street : SEVENTH HEAVEN <i> by Alice Hoffman (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $18.95; 256 pp.; 0-399-13535-9) </i>

It is easy to laugh at the suburbs, whose very existence represents compromise, neither sophisticated urban life nor bucolic splendor. American writers and certainly our film makers have had a field day in the suburbs. From the magical stories of John Cheever to the horror-genre “The Stepford Wives,” the ties that bind, and the places in which they pinch, have been rich material.

The suburbs present a wonderful chance for artists to show the tension in all of us between freedom and security, wildness and steadiness. The newness of the suburbs promises the perfect rebirth: escape from the past’s mistakes and making the future correctly.

As Alice Hoffman shows in the opening of her accomplished new novel, “Seventh Heaven,” the building of a new development is an act against nature, and the triumph of new gods over the old:

“The subdivision was carved out of a potato farm six years earlier. . . . All that first spring, renegade potatoes were unearthed when the men on Hemlock Street put down their lawns and planted mimosas and poplars; on trash day there would be heaps of potatoes alongside the aluminum cans.”

The new inhabitants of the potato field are families who own the land and the house they live in for the first time in their history. They have left behind the city, and hope they have bought not only a patch of earth to be landscaped and a house to be maintained, but also a future for their children. Like all pioneers, they hope they have left behind class and kin.

“Everything in the neighborhood was brand new, the elementary school, the high school, the A&P;, the police station on the Turnpike. The air itself seemed new; it could make you dizzy if you weren’t used to it, and relatives visiting from Brooklyn or -ueens often had to lie down on a couch with a damp handkerchief pressed to their temples.”

Such bright hopes are part of what make the suburbs so easy to mock. Whoever thinks he can be kept safe and happy by buying a house, and by creating a tight, conventional community; whoever thinks security can be bought, leaves himself open to ridicule and trouble.

“Seventh Heaven” begins in the sabbatical year of the development’s existence. Until recently, its newness had such a firm hold that even its residents became lost as they traveled on the identical streets, and they often mistook an identical house for their own. But things have settled down, and now “ . . . when children played kickball on summer nights, they knew exactly which screen door to swing open . . . “

The newness has been twinned by a fidelity to sameness, sacred to the suburbs: “To have peace with your neighbors you needed to adhere to two unspoken rules: Mind your own business and keep up your lawn.” Other rules: Conform and stick to strick sexual definition of family roles; good wives don’t work.

But the pact is violated. Mr. Olivera, owner of the house on the corner of Hemlock, dies in his sleep. His widow vacates to Florida. The property begins to go down. A sweet stench arises from inside. Nature begins to reassert itself: Mr. Olivera’s lawn becomes an untameable jungle.

Chaos, in the form of decay and falling property values, panics the men of Hemlock Street. They mow the lawn as best they can and, in the dusk of one evening, pawn off the rotting house on the attractive, lively, imaginative and financially strapped mother of a 9-year-old clairvoyant and an adorable infant. Nora Silk’s presence trumpets the start of the greening of Hemlock Street.

She is an affectionately drawn character, divorced from a mediocre Las Vegas magician, grand-daughter of a man who had taught her less commercial and more powerful magic. She is another pioneer to the suburbs, and also a supplicant. She wishes for her sons what the other parents do: security, sweet air, clean clothes and a place on the team. But it is 1959 and on Hemlock Street even the mention of divorce is forbidden, though not even divorce is as threatening as Nora’s abundant sexuality.

Hoffman’s 1959 is the cusp between the old and the new. Once John Kennedy is elected, the world will change and the revolution will begin in morals, rock ‘n’ roll, child-rearing; and that revolution touches Hemlock Street with new life and death.

Nora starts life on Hemlock Street by chasing away three crows that have been terrifying the neighbors from her roof (salt on their tails). Of all the residents of the block, only she and Joe Hennessey (a local policeman recently promoted to plainclothes detective and uneasy in his rank) seem to understand that happiness on Hemlock Street depends dangerously on delusion and and the deliberate refusal to acknowledge the existence of crime, anger, wife-beating, family murder, promiscuity and other proof of the dark side of the human character. Joe suffers to preserve the delusion. Nora startles the little society with her high heels and long nails, and her beauty. The other wives shun her like bad news.

In the course of the novel, in a pleasing and surprising sequence of events, Nora and her offspring become more like the neighbors, and they, with her guidance, by example and instruction, become more alive and kind, and more like Nora. Sisterhood blooms on Hemlock Street.

Hoffman’s suburban tale is a pleasure to read. Her narrative is clever, self-confident and even-handed. She never ridicules even the most small-minded of her characters. She seems to share the 19th-Century writer’s conviction that since pain and doom come to all characters, why kick them first.

Hoffman’s book is by turns funny and sad, but always has a sweetness to it. Even meanness and malice get turned to communion. She is wonderful at capturing the small, important pleasures of dawn and dusk, and at portraying familiar tangles.

In Alice Hoffman’s skillful hands, “Seventh Heaven” is not only entertaining--it gives one new respect for tender suburban dreams.