CALIFORNIA Angels : MAKING HISTORY <i> By Carolyn See</i> , <i> (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 276 pp.)</i>

In the California over which Carolyn See presides in her fifth novel, “Making History,” the center of the world is the Pacific Rim. If to be a California writer is to have a certain self-awareness and mind set, then the author has surely grasped and presented the hard news about contemporary West Coast relationships in this novel, perceptive in its details and ambitious in its daring.

The author’s reach goes far in this book--past the doomsday Los Angeles of “Golden Days” and the feminist glow of the Southern California women in “Rhine Maidens.” In “Making History,” See evokes a grown-up Los Angeles, a terra firma both complex and ominous. One is reminded of all the caveats--especially the one about “the best laid plans . . . “ Random dangers lurk in the city, so reader take care.

As in a film, the author moves us back and forth, framing first the urban life of an affluent modern family; then, as disasters mount, the frame shifts to the world of vision and dream. The book is about relationships in a modern world. At first the prose seems casual and colloquial, and that is enough to catch you off guard. But you can’t race through this book, for it offers a score of epiphanies.

The author forgoes the comforts of conventional narrative structure here. There is no straightforward plot, hardly a plot at all. It is more a novel about what happens in life. The story is episodic, the chapters named for characters, places, dates. All this movement can be tricky, but the book maintains its tone as it unveils its intensely moving portrait.

In a house in Pacific Palisades lives the primary family: Jerry, Wynn and their young children, Tina and Josh. How real these people seem as they push against the claustrophobic limits of domesticity! Even the names sound the notes of a particular regional ambience: The children’s school is called Golden Oaks. The house has all the trappings of success--the window with its sliver of ocean view, the bedroom loaded with modern machines “like a branch of Hammacher Schlemmer,” the ever-present housekeeper, and the lady of the house who cannot remember when she last made a bed. Everyone seems to have had a first marriage--that ritual mistake.

Jerry is the classic good provider, the new-world entrepreneur--part-businessman, part-idealist. Wynn is his wife, and to this second marriage she has brought Whitney, a teen-ager who lives in a cupola across the driveway, physically separated from the nuclear family. It is in Whitney that the fragile and shifting relationships of the family are embodied.

The family drama is the focus, the driving force--but we are not about to be trapped in any banal suburban malaise. See is too good for that, and she knowingly explores the facade of civility with which her characters interact. Where does the power lie? Who can destroy?

In every sense the world is Jerry’s oyster, from Tokyo to Jakarta to Komodo. The complete businessman, he creates markets for products that people didn’t even know they wanted--Texas barbecue sauce in Japan, for instance. The descriptions of Jerry on the road plunge us into cultural journeys--as if we had slipped through an earth crack. This is in contrast to the home in California, where everything is recognizable.

Sometimes, despite the author’s agility, information pours forth too abundantly--fiction moving into fiscal travelogue. Yet despite this cavil, we willingly follow Jerry to his business meeting in Tokyo, from the hundred-dollar steaks to an evening in a brothel. And we are right beside him as he contemplates voracious lizards in Komodo: “Now the guides, the escorts, were pushing the white men up against the splintered fence, so they could look, had to look, into the arid crevasse.”

While Jerry improves the world, Wynn stays home, the embodiment of the old/new wife; she paid her dues in a first marriage to a pseudo-minister who abandoned her and their child. Wynn’s comfortable life with Jerry creates a complete divorce from her past “because, to her sister and mother, breaking out of the cell of poverty and sadness was the worst kind of betrayal.”

But irrational dangers threaten even golden families. Disaster comes suddenly, spoiling--without warning.

Whitney is injured in an automobile accident. How gripping, how horrific: “The girl flicked her eyes in her bleeding, seeping head. “Ma! I don’t have any teeth ma!’ ”

The crash is fatal to Whitney’s friend Robin. He lives on as a character, though--a teen-age spirit, talking to the reader in a relaxed and affecting manner. He even has his own chapters.

This is not, then, a realistic account of life in the city--a tale of one family’s troubles. It is part fantasy, and must prove itself. See has done this by making the miraculous just a tad ordinary and by not violating the logic of the characters. Nothing can be as dangerous to a story as the sudden appearance of a spirit, but Robin succeeds. Seldom has a ghostly presence been so acceptable, or provided so insightful and moving an account of events he witnesses.

The accident destroys the illusion of safety that money created. Should Wynn have gotten angry, kept her daughter from driving with other children, curbed her behavior? Never mind that Whitney will recover--disaster changes everything. Wynn finds herself drawing closer to her first-born child, and makes a place for her hospital bed on the veranda. The physical breach seems to be closed. “But who would have known that pain might heal that? That, for these few weeks at least, she and all her children could live under the same roof, and spend their hours together.”

With the addition of Whitney’s friend Tracie and Tracie’s mother Kathy, a community of women forms on that veranda. Kathy is at once recognizable as Wynn’s “soulmate”--a woman who also married a rich man. They spend their afternoons together circling Whitney’s bed. The women are totally believable--wrapped in domestic comfort, they storm no ramparts and shout no slogans. All the time Jerry is elsewhere--making deals, devising new ways to live.

The novel creates many miniature worlds. Temporary Success is such a world--a firm that provides nebulous services where Whitney and Tracie take summer jobs after they graduate from Golden Oaks. They act as hostesses at conferences--pretty girls who speed through experiences, absorbing sensations. Life, after all, has already proven dangerous.

When reality is fearsome, we turn to dreams and visions. Wouldn’t most people want to know about their past lives--if they had past lives? Would that knowledge make the present more bearable? Of all the extraordinary characters that See creates in this novel, the most problematic is Thea, the mystic, who arrives in California after abandoning husband and children in Australia. Alas, Thea skirts the edges of plausibility. A quasi-heroic figure, she appears on the scene and acquires an instant reputation as a reader of both past lives and the future. She moves into the garage of a down-at-the-heels man named Donny and provides him with past lives more interesting than any life he had ever known: “Donny told his neighbors, everyone who would listen, that he had once been something like a sex god in the South Seas.” Because in this book everything connects, Thea, of course, had met Jerry in Australia climbing the landmark Ayers Rock (one of those because-it’s-there experiences). So one is suspicious of the way she clicks into the world of his family. Is her power real or is she a charlatan? “You were always a grudge-holder, and a pain in the butt. You had attitude to burn,” she tells Whitney, “but everyone loved you so much they overlooked it.” Ultimately, she predicts a surprise for Whitney--a trip. But isn’t that what fortune tellers do?

It is dangerous to live in the city where trouble comes unbidden again and again. The final disaster, an urban nightmare, is of mythic proportions. Robin is present. Perhaps Thea offers hope in the possibility of other lives. Readers shall have to make up their own minds. “Making History” is a satisfying and remarkable book.