Attempting to Cope With the Impossible : PLAIN GRIEF, <i> by Maxine Chernoff,</i> Summit Books, $19, 220 pages

Plain grief, fancy dealings. This novel covers six days, examines the dreadful marriages of two sisters, and how their two respective daughters deal with the emotionally impossible. The impossible in this case means lives that are, or have become, absolutely unbearable.

The main thing about this piece of fiction is that it starts out tentatively and looks as though it’s going to predictably churn along, but then toward the end--over that span of six awful days--the action lurches, lunges and offers a conclusion both satisfying and surprising.

The story begins in Chicago, on Thanksgiving. Sarah, a mother, wife, sister, daughter and heroine of this novel, dutifully puts supper on the table. It’s the perfect, horrible holiday dinner. Sarah’s mother, recently widowed, is both bereft and frail. Larry, Sarah’s no-count womanizing bum of a husband, is beside himself with impotent rage. His wife, whom he’s been cheating on systematically for 15 years, has found herself a handsome American Indian lover--Jeremy Bone Shoulder. Larry is as stung as if he had been utterly faithful for the last decade and a half. He’s been led to believe by his upbringing that it’s his right and obligation to treat Sarah like dirt, and he snarls like a schoolyard bully who’s been deprived of his victim--until Sarah calls Scott, their son, Carrie, their daughter, and Deenie, their visiting niece, in to dinner.

But Carrie and Deenie have gone--run away. They can’t take it anymore. And Larry socks Sarah in the eye as hard as he can. The rest of the novel begins.

Deenie has come to visit because she really can’t take it anymore. Her mother, Mae, Sarah’s older sister, is a full-on alcoholic. Deenie’s father is a man of dubious sexuality who attends Manhood Seminars and has hooked up with what has to be the meanest therapist in recent fiction. One of his treatments for Deenie is to scream at her until he gets tired. Deenie has been trying for weeks to fade out of this picture by not eating; she’s anorexic.

Just another perfect holiday weekend! Carrie and Deenie take the Greyhound bus to Los Angeles to hook up with a cute guy named Branch in order to journey to Costa Rica. Larry stays home and sulks like the husband in “Thelma and Louise.” (Remember, a woman wrote this book, a woman fed up with the configuration of women having to settle for unhappiness and persecution as their lot in life.) Sarah and Jeremy Bone Shoulder fly out to Los Angeles to intercept the runaways.

During a series of present-time vignettes and flashbacks, we discover that Sarah and her lover have met at a grief seminar. She was there in order to mourn her father; Jeremy attended to mourn his whole race. They have fallen wildly in love. We see that Sarah and Larry never should have married in the first place: They are totally incompatible; he’s desperately lonely whenever he happens to be with his wife.

Out on the road, Carrie learns some stuff about life, and Deenie--we see more and more--is in a truly hellish position. There are more than enough reasons why she has stopped eating.

It’s easy to call these human transactions “voyages of discovery,” but that’s what they are. Some of them are scary and unpleasant. For pages at a time, the novel stops so that characters can get to know each other. What the reader witnesses is the splitting of one family, the way a single human cell splits, into several other units. There’s pain attached, but it’s desperately interesting. In a quiet way, this novel is a great argument for divorce. We should live the life that’s appropriate for us. The reasons for any of us to labor like galley slaves in lives that we hate are inadequate, and probably nonexistent.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “The Frozen Leopard” by Aaron Latham (Prentice Hall).