Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch . . . : RELATIVE DISTANCES <i> By Victoria Jenkins (Peregrine Smith Books: $15.95; 144 pp.; 0-879905-251-1) </i>

Victoria Jenkins’ slim little novel, “Relative Distances,” is an almost perfect depiction of the austere realities of ranching life and the consequences of such a difficult, isolated existence. Set in Wyoming, it features a family whose ties have been so stretched that they seem to have snapped, leaving each member to fend emotionally for himself. The tale centers on Myra Wells, a hapless, 36-year-old drifter who drives an old Cadillac, a “relic of a past romance . . . red under layers of highway-sprayed slush,” and drags behind it a mobile home, suggesting the rootlessness that has plagued her troubled life.

With the sort of unceremonious impetuousness that seems to have marked much of her life, Myra dumps her boyfriend Vernon, who scrambles to grab his belongings from her trailer before she tows it away. She has decided to return to the Wyoming ranching community where she grew up, in the hope she might save what is left of her future.

Married at 14, a mother at 15 and divorced a few years later, Myra long ago left her son Tom behind and began wandering from one dead-end job to another, running a boarding house in a bleak little town, working in construction and mining, going through lovers the way some people do shoes. Her parents are dead; all that’s left of her immediate family is her son Tom and her cousin Arlen, who seduced her when she was 13 and for whom she still harbors complicated and romantic feelings.

It’s been so long since she’s seen her son that he’s grown up in her absence and is now a young man of 20, working on Arlen’s ranch. Their reunion is poignantly awkward. When she encircles him with her arms, he stands passive, and quietly says, “Hi, Ma.” She tells him, “Me and Vernon have split up.” “Who’s Vernon?” he asks, emphasizing how little he knows about the life of the stranger who is his mother.

Arlen gives her a job on the ranch, though inevitably her return stirs things up. Arlen’s own marriage has dried up. He stays with his wife, Florence, out of economic convenience and sneaks off to town to see his girlfriend, a plump woman named Valerie Pruitt who seems willing to put up with his taciturnity out of sheer boredom.

Tom, Arlen and Florence don’t seem overly happy to have Myra back. It’s as if their own harsh lives have made them indifferent to the fates of others. Arlen’s son, Neal, however, looks upon Myra as a welcome addition to life on the ranch. Caught on the cusp of manhood, Neal finds her a romantic prospect, in spite of the fact Myra is 16 years his senior, as well as his second-cousin.

Jenkins is good at evoking the day-to-day life on a ranch, the unglamorous realities of hardscrabble existence, as well as the warmth of drop-in neighbors who offer up no-nonsense hospitality in cluttered kitchens. Her descriptions of milking, calving and branding, her feeling for horses and her depiction of the immensity of the landscape imbue her writing with the details that lend her story its richness. She also is adept at swiftly summing up character. She can impart a sense of a lifelong marriage in a few sentences, as in this description of Arlen’s sister Rosemary and her husband, Ray:

“She was the oldest; a big-boned, graceless woman with indoor skin and an invalid petulance, who had jumped as a girl, when fortune smiled, to marry Ray Macky, a cowboy from east of the river with a walleye and, at thirty, false teeth and a head smooth and white as an egg on top. . . . Arthritis stiffened and skewed Rosemary’s hands and cortisone puffed her. Some days she never got out of her housecoat. Ray treated her like a jewel, fastening buttons and shampooing her head under the kitchen faucet with gentle fingers, and conspiring with her in the public fiction that things were otherwise, rising most mornings from the couch to make his own coffee and carry a cup in to her along with the first four aspirins of the day.”

Myra is equally well-drawn, although more complex and sadder, primarily because she’s such a loner. Arlen had laid in the back of her mind “like a remittent destiny” and her feelings for him could easily develop into passion again were it not for his attachment to Valerie Pruitt. Instead, her eye drifts toward Neal, and during the annual cattle drive to summer pasture, the emotions that have built up finally explode.

The West is a place of challenge where everyone is encouraged to live out his own myth, but in this bittersweet novel, Jenkins seems to be saying that too often the myths end up being so circumscribed by poverty and struggle and limited choices as to seem more like cruel fate. Nature is perhaps the most celebrated aspect of life, not human fortunes, which are impoverished.

There is nothing, however, impoverished about this first novel, which has a pure and unforced beauty, and a lovely heart-rending honesty.