BOOK REVIEW : A Charming Tale With a Bleak Message : I CANNOT GET YOU CLOSE ENOUGH <i> by Ellen Gilchrist</i> ; Little, Brown $19.95. 418 pages)

The three novellas collected in “I Cannot Get You Close Enough” address the common problems of parents: How can I love my child enough? How can I fake the kid out if I don’t love him or her? And, finally, how can I keep from passing on my own neuroses, my neural tics, my sadness, my weirdness, my greed, my self-loathing, on to the next generation?

Forget it, author Ellen Gilchrist says. You cannot ever love your child enough. You cannot begin to fake it if you don’t love your child, because children see through you like a clean window. And, especially, you can’t help but pass your gene pool on.

If you really want to get depressed, take a look at your own parents. Then take a look at yourself. Then take a look at your beautiful young kids. Then go out to the nearest bar and order a stiff drink, because never, no matter what you do, will you be able to avoid the awful phenomenon of your kids turning out to be quite a lot like your own parents.

Still, men and women persist in having children, over and over again. And they cannot ever love them enough.

Actually, considering its subject matter, this collection is suave, cheerful, witty and appealing.

Whole fistfuls of elegant adult characters (who live variously in Charlotte, N.C., or New Orleans, and who summer, luxuriously, in fine old houses in Maine) plot, scheme, make love, make dinner, write letters, plan parties, deceive their husbands and desert their wives, and generally get on with the business of daily life.

None of them work very hard. Their money is family money, and their main collective flaw is that they want what they want when they want it.

Daniel, a weak womanizer, wants his women. Anna, a vain novelist, commits suicide on a whim, when things don’t go her way. Crystal wants to avoid sleeping with her husband, while taking him for all the money he’s got.

In a kind of standard Southern sentimental turn, the only decent adult in this menagerie is a black maid named Traceleen. She works for Crystal and sees that meals get on the table and that the children get loved.

There are quite a lot of children here: Weak Daniel has the beautiful Jessie and another child by a forgotten marriage to a Cherokee woman who died in childbirth. This half-cast is destined not to be loved. Traceleen herself has a niece of interracial parentage, Andrea, who has decided never to fall in love. Traceleen is hopelessly “in love with” Crystal’s 9-year-old, little Crystal Anne. That child’s own mother scarcely knows she’s alive.

At the center of this seemingly plotless set of stories, Jessie-the-Beautiful and a nitwit teen-age ne’er-do-well fall into what they are pleased to think of as “love.” Naturally, Jessie gets pregnant. Some of the adults want the baby; some don’t. Eight and a half months later, Jessie-the-Beautiful is no longer beautiful or loved.

The other side of wronging your children, Ellen Gilchrist seems to say, is that they--not meaning to--wrong you. They rob parents of their own lives, make them slaves for the second two-thirds of their lives, push them inexorably toward their graves, ruthlessly steal away their dreams.

Gilchrist is a sweet and seemly writer. She strings out the most appealing material in a very charming way. Her message in this book is bleak. Its only saving grace is that we can’t win. We knew it all along.