FICTION

OUT OF TIME by Helen Schulman (Atheneum: $19.95; 224 pp.). When 15-year-old Kenny Gold fell through the ice in Connecticut, “cracks shot across the surface of the lake like a shattered windshield.” Miraculously, he survives, bragging that he “kissed Death’s stony face and . . . got the hell out of there.” Six years later, Death, that spurned lover, comes back for keeps. Kenny drives his car into a tree, and the cracks that branch out from that collision rupture the lives of his family and friends for years to come.

Helen Schulman’s novel-in-stories begins with the death, then describes its effects. Kenny’s mother Hannah is permanently broken. His unstable sister Cara is pushed into something worse than neurosis. His older brother Doug becomes uptight and cautious. His younger brother Jeremy grows up missing someone he never really knew. Kenny’s girlfriends, his college roommate--even his siblings’ lovers and a neighbor who heard the crash in the middle of the night--are faintly but indelibly marked.

The cracks run backward as well as forward. Kenny’s death seems to point out the flaws in his parents’ marriage, foreshadow Jeremy’s HIV infection and comment on an assimilated Jewish family’s loss of ethnic identity and the decline of liberal politics. Whose absence could accomplish all this? A handsome, devil-may-care but seemingly ordinary young man who is “born passionate but without a single passion” and who--when Schulman returns to him in the final chapter--deliberately risks his life to give it a sense of meaning.

As a novel, “Out of Time” may overstate its case, but the individual stories are fine. Schulman (whose previous book, “Not a Free Show,” was a story collection) writes in a variety of voices--humorous, ironic, intense--and with a sure grasp of family dynamics. Fortunately, given the emphasis on mortality, her characters are a lively bunch.