BOOK REVIEW : Vivid Images Get Buried Under Verbiage : IN SILENCE; Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World <i> by Ruth Sidransky</i> St. Martin’s Press $18.95, 339 pages

Where are the editors who should be helping writers, especially writers with plenty of goodwill but not much experience, to produce shapely books in vivid, economical prose? Inside the 300 or so pages of Ruth Sidransky’s “In Silence,” an appealing slender volume may be longing to get out.

The premise of Sidransky’s book is certainly intriguing: to recapture the world, at once silent and strident, in which the hearing daughter of deaf parents grew up in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mary, congenitally deaf, and Ben, who lost his hearing after he contracted spinal meningitis at age 2, had little formal education, and even that, because it stressed oral speech rather than signing, offered only frustration.

Nevertheless, Ben supported his family, meagerly but respectably, as an upholsterer; before her marriage, Mary too held a job, and thereafter she kept an immaculate house and reared Ruth and her younger brother, Fred.

Occasionally, the lives of the couple take on genuine power and poignancy, as when Mary is discovered by her daughter railing against God for making her deaf: “Tomorrow I will forgive God,” she blazes, “not today.”

Too often, however, the details Sidransky has chosen make them seem like overgrown and not over-bright children: Benny, comic and fey, inexplicably brandishing a rat in the faces first of his family and then of the neighborhood grocer; Mary, full of quaint notions like “brain not so sharp as when you read in real light of day,” depending heavily on her daughter, “as she did all the years of my life, to be her ears, her voice.”

The root of Sidransky’s problem in characterizing Ben and Mary lies in language. As she explains: “Sentences were signed, spoken in deaf shorthand, prepositions and conjunctions usually omitted. Strong verbs enunciated in the present tense; the words today, yesterday and tomorrow added for absolute clarity.”

Not trusting her readers to bear this description in mind, however, she transcribes the “voice of sign” verbatim; thus, in a typical passage, Ben says: “I true sorry I not go to college learn better, but I learn always, in a world college. Maybe one day you go to a college, be smart, maybe more smart than Ben.”

The translator of a French novel doesn’t emphasize that a character spoke originally in French by having him report, “I have pain at the head” rather than “My head aches.”

If Ben is fluent in sign, his words ought not to be translated into fractured English.

In characterizing her own anomalous experience as “a deaf little girl with ears that could hear,” Sidransky is more successful. Her first sentence, at 11 months, was signed, not spoken. At school, because her speech imitated her parents’ vocalizations, she was first put into a class for mentally retarded children.

For a while, she wheedled invitations to classmates’ homes, searching for “an oral-speaking mother, any mother would do.” She remained passionately attached to her parents, however, like some of the other children she knew in similar circumstances:

“We were the ones who buried the silence within. We abandoned our dreams and took care of our deaf mothers and fathers. They were our children, and we were their parents. We, the children, were invisible.”

Fortunately, this passage is hyperbolic. Although often angry and ambivalent, the author was successful in school, went on to college, married, had children of her own, and maintained loving but not suffocating relationships with Ben and Mary until their quite recent deaths.

Overwriting, to the point of fulsomeness, is a frequent defect in Sidransky’s prose style. But occasionally a vivid image, plainly spoken, resists burial--”my mother’s fist echoing in my eyes”--and we glimpse the rich, confused linguistic world of the child who both hears and sees words, who will all her life dream in sign and think in hands.

In recent years, books by people whose lives have been shaped in a variety of ways by disability have multiplied.

In fact, the Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica has just established what may be the first section devoted to disability studies in the country.

We must take care, however, not to condescend subtly to these authors by lowering the literary standards to which we hold them.

The life of a hearing daughter of deaf parents can be communicated superbly, as Carol Glickfield demonstrates in her collection of short stories, “Useful Gifts,” which won the Flannery O’Connor Award a few years ago.

“In Silence,” although it holds some pleasant moments, falls short of the mark.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Light Possessed” by Alan Cheuse (Gibbs Smith).