A Terminally Marginal Family : BLUEPRINTS <i> By Sara Vogan (Bantam Books: $19.95, cloth; $8.95, paper; 288 pp.) </i>

Mitch Snyder, the now-deceased homeless-rights advocate, used to equate the nuclear family with nuclear war. After finishing Sara Vogan’s “Blueprints,” the reader may begin to make the same comparison.

Vogan portrays a family that cuts a swath of destruction around itself and leaves a trail of battered psyches in its wake. Out of this wasteland of a 1950s dream family gone bad steps a narrator, the daughter, Maureen Emery Lannier:

“By the time I went to college I hated my name so much I dropped it altogether. Emery, my grandmother’s maiden name, felt right. I liked the idea of grinding and polishing, a hard abrasive substance. I grew to see myself like that; grinding and polishing myself to remove the traces of Frank and Nina from my life.”

However, Emery can neither scrape away her parents, Frank and Nina, nor get them to call her anything but Maura.

The narrative begins when the 40-ish Emery goes to her parents’ house hoping to find the home she has never had. After spending the last 25 years trying to run away from her parents and her past, Emery is looking to make peace with them (her mother has written that Emery’s father is about to die) as well as with herself. Soon after her arrival, her parents’ house burns to the ground.

Fires can be cathartic, therapeutic, the kind of controlled burning that allows forests to grow back stronger than before. However, this fire symbolically reveals the rotted foundation, or blueprint, of their lives.

In this book, the emotional and physical scars left on the soul and body serve as the blueprints upon which lives are built. “Even though he (Drew) was my brother, our scars weren’t identical,” says Emery. “We all grow up differently, learn different lessons. Tattoos. Scars. Scars don’t tan. Scars don’t heal. Scars don’t. Scars are. “

Regardless of how much Emery would like to turn her back on the past and its scars, she can not. On one level, the narrative deals with Emery’s attempts to deal with present-day life, the effort to find her parents new housing and the like. In a subtext, driven by her frequent flashbacks as she metonymically skips between past and present, she attempts to deal with the past. She knows, however, that “reinventing the past is as impossible as skating on hot water.”

The Lanniers resemble the self-contained, eccentric, virtually friendless families that Anne Tyler creates. However, with the Lanniers, eccentricities shade into pathologies. “My family must be terminally marginal,” Emery thinks. “We were a normal, middle-class family. On the right track in a wrecked car. “

The parents, Frank and Nina, drink themselves into stupors nearly every night. Nina, who rivals Fitzgerald’s Nicole Diver for literary lunacy, drifts in and out of hallucinatory periods and catatonic states. “Frankly, I enjoyed my mother most when we were drinking,” Emery confesses, “not when she was sober or drunk, but those early stages about a quarter of the way down the bottle, when she was just loose enough to appear to be actually talking to you. . . .”

The children, Emery and Drew, are so shellshocked from their childhood that they refuse to marry or bear children. They take refuge in each other. “ ‘There’s always been you and I,’ Drew said. ‘We’ve never gotten close to anyone else.’ ” There also is a third child, Julia, long dead, present in the book only through her absence.

Absences affect this book like black holes, always tugging at characters. Throughout her works, Vogan deals with loss, whether it be the loss of a limb--a particular fascination of hers--or of a lover. Emery’s sometime lover, Paris, and her younger sister, Julia, hover in the penumbra of “Blueprints,” although Paris does make a few appearances. According to Emery, “We all live with ghosts. Paris is my ghost, Julia is my mother’s.” Emery can say goodby to Paris, if only for a while, but her mother cannot say goodby to Julia.

In “Blueprints” as well as in her other books (“In Shelly’s Leg,” “Loss of Flight,” “Scenes From the Homefront”), Vogan knits facts, concrete knowledge, into the fabric of fiction, almost as if she is following the Renaissance ethos of attempting to instruct and delight. Content affects style because her writing often takes on a didactic air.

Vogan front-loads paragraphs, beginning them with the sort of topic sentences typically found in expository writing. Not only does this give her writing a unique flavor, it also gives her prose a punchy quality without weighing it down in details.

Facts provide means of communication when emotions fail, and provide characters with an anchor when uncertainty swirls around them. “Shopping carts were invented in Oklahoma City, you know that?” Emery asks Drew. “Facts again. A fact could be used as a tool in any emergency. The verbal equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife.”

Vogan’s use of facts further expands a wide-ranging voice. Vogan writes convincingly of the human world and lyrically about the natural world. Phrases remain. “ ‘Actually, I’m waiting for the snow. If you look,’ and he (Kiskejohn) pointed toward the moon, ‘you can almost see the cold drawing up into the clouds,’ ” or Emery: “That was the first sunrise I remember, opening as gracefully as a blood-red fan.”

Vogan’s vision includes a transcendent, almost mystical perception of the body that reminds one of John Casey and perhaps traces back to Emerson. Emery (a female Emerson?) has a hypersensitive awareness of her body as if she is at once observing it and inhabiting it: “My spirit was sinking, slipping like mercury down my spine to pool in my instep. . . . My blood felt thick as honey and just as slow.”

Vogan presents interpersonal relations with similar sensitivity. Her ear for dialogue, particularly Nina’s lucid ravings and lunatic logic, is incisive. Her characterizations are, by and large, convincing and complete. If one character is not entirely clear it is Emery, perhaps the most complex character Vogan has yet created and perhaps a character not intended to be fully understood. Emery removes veil after veil as the book progresses, yet her image remains as hazy and shifting as ever.

Vogan’s fourth book and third novel, “Blueprints” is powerfully well written. Certain themes or interests--Eskimos, the Arctic, sharks, birds, animals, dreams--course through Vogan’s writing. The “fight-or-flight” motif, so prominent in the previous books, is again central; nonetheless she continues to impress in this, her first novel written in the first person, with the startling breadth of her imagination.