This Novel’s Humor Doesn’t Travel Well Beyond the Hudson : THE WAY WE LIVE NOW, <i> by Marian Thurm,</i> Bantam, $19.50, 304 pages

Certain Italian wines can’t travel. You have to travel to where they were made to taste what they really taste like. Technology won’t fix this problem: Some products, some artifacts, weren’t made to be moved.

“The Way We Live Now” is about the perils and crises of an extended Jewish family who lives in New York City, with a dreaded old folks’ home in Miami as the period to their life sentence. Jewish jokes abound. There are characters here named Barbara-Rose Blanksteen and Honey Finkleman. Every old mother is a Jewish mother, dispensing guilt the way a yogurt dispenser squeezes out hurt.

Reading this novel out here in Los Angeles, it’s hard not to think: It may be the way they live now; it’s certainly not the way we live.

The plot: Leora, a sweet young wife, is married to Spike Goldman, who has been in therapy for about as long as he’s been alive and who has been married before to Suzanne--who is as flamboyant as Leora is sweet.

When Leora gives birth to Baby Benjamin, Suzanne appears in Spike’s life again and becomes best friends with Leora. (Why this happens, what motivates Leora and Suzanne to engage in this best-friendship is never explored or explained.)

It infuriates Spike, whose troubles are exacerbated by the monthly audiotapes his terribly depressed mother sends him from the Miami old folks’ home, and who finally has to drop everything and journey to that horrid place, when his mother attempts suicide from an overdose of Valium. This particular scene, when Spike tries to gain entrance to his mother’s apartment, is treated as humorous. (Is that the way people are living now? Maybe so.)

Meanwhile, Leora, the sweet wife, has a father, Alexander Fine, who has recently become a widower. Alexander is numb with loneliness and grief and hangs out with an old Jewish couple who do nothing but vilify each other. (The wife is a vindictive and vicious alcoholic.) Alexander’s house is cleaned by a black woman named Ionie, whose granddaughter, Shavonne, has just had a baby and left it to stay with Ionie. This maid is very nice and capable and wears white ankle socks over her panty hose.

Alexander falls in love with Ionie, who brings her great-granddaughter to come and live with them. Then everybody gets to be surprised. There’s some more plot here, but the problem seems to be that no one has any dignity. When Shavonne comes to visit, she hits her child. Alexander Fine asks her not to hit the kid: “She’s a baby, Shavonne, and we don’t hit babies. Not ever.” Shavonne answers: “But why can’t I hurt her if I want to?”

The whole question of racism is such an iffy one. It may be true that young black mothers hit their kids, but does that belong in a comic novel? And should it be treated as essentially comic?

It may be true that elderly Jewish mothers attempt suicide to get their sons’ attention, but is that a funny situation?

It may be true that Jewish widowers marry their black maids. But what does that mean for the world of fiction? Isn’t dealing with stereotypes still considered to be a type of literary bad manners?

Finally, the character of Spike--that husband in therapy--seems remarkably deficient; emotionally, spiritually, intellectually. Plainly put, he’s a dope.

But, again, this whole novel may read differently when you cross the Hudson and find yourself a nice apartment on West End Avenue and trek out to museums and start leading that Woody Allen life. But I think you will have to travel to it; I don’t think it will travel to you.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom” by Peter W. Huber (Basic).