A Bushel of Bad Apples : WILD APPLES, <i> By Lucinda Franks (Random House: $20; 391 pp.)</i>

Somewhere back in the musty corners of childhood lie the ghosts of injuries we suffered at the hands of those who loved us. Once, potent dramas of seduction and betrayal unfolded over family dinners, or in whispers at bedtime: We were singled out, confided in; we were used as weapons in marriages we didn’t understand.

For sheer ecstasy and pain, these experiences may be hard to match in life, and many of us end up carrying them around obsessively, unable to resolve or let them go. Worse yet, we might unthinkingly torture our own children in ways passed down through generations of neurotic relatives, unless something is done to break the cycle.

This is the fictional territory of “Wild Apples,” a first novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lucinda Franks. A rambling saga of familial Angst, it’s about returning to the scene of childhood and ripping open old wounds in order to exorcise the past.

The book begins with an especially potent scene of disillusionment: The aristocratic Woolsey-Bean family, having fallen on hard times, is holding an auction of precious “heirlooms”--a mixture of antiques and old junk from their sagging Victorian mansion in New York’s Hudson River Valley. At stake is the fate of their 100-year-old, nearly bankrupt apple farm, but they’re so taken by their own legacy that they buy back much of what they’d planned to sell.

Augusta, the elder of two daughters, is the pragmatist, the successful Hollywood talent agent who has come home to take charge after her mother Lydia’s death. Nellie, her sister, a 29-year-old with the emotions of a teen-ager, has never left the farm, which she’s kept running--just barely--despite bad crops and buy-out threats from a neighboring electronics plant. The family patriarch, Henry Bean, a recovering alcoholic, is less than useless to his daughters, fumbling in and out of rooms in pursuit of escapees from his bee collection.

Without his help, over the course of six months, the sisters battle to save their heritage and to understand the family legacy of despair and self-disgust that lay behind their mother’s wildly erratic treatment of them. Spiced with a simmering sibling rivalry, the requisite love intrigue (two sisters, one man) and an environmentally correct subplot (family farm versus manipulative corporate polluters), the novel gains further depth through the discovery of Lydia’s diaries. For the two women, they are a window on the past, a source of humanizing insights that mitigate their bitter memories of their mother. The diaries, which Lydia more or less wills to her daughters, portray in poignant detail a lonely girl, rejected by her own mother, who pins her hopes first on marriage, then on motherhood, and feels a failure at both.

Unfortunately for the novel, not as much care or precision are lavished on developing the present as on evoking the past. Franks draws her characters broadly: Augusta has an “azure-eyed stare” and “cornsilk hair,” and William, the love interest, is not only “disturbingly attractive,” he also verges on sainthood in his protectiveness of the environment and the Woolsey-Bean sisters.

Interactions between these people are correspondingly formulaic. In contrast to the idiomatic and sometimes fumbling quality of true conversation, Woolsey-Bean talk is thorough and without innuendo. Frank’s characters tend to say every word they’re thinking, and they don’t use slang or pause to think or interrupt each other. Most of what is said--or thought--gets hashed out further in equally uninspired interpretation and exposition. We are told much more than we are shown, for example, about the shock of recognizing one’s parents in oneself, or the horrors of alcoholism, or the tragedy of explanations that come too late to be useful.

Finally, the book follows a very predictable course toward a tidy conclusion. There are no unexpected bumps and curves to keep the pages turning, nor are there any of the loose ends and ragged edges of true experience. Reading along, you might wish that William--juggling two eager, adoring women--will turn out to be a heartless cad or that the sisters--stressed-out, short of money, competing for their man--might eventually fly at each other and have a screaming, hair-pulling showdown. Instead, not to give it all away, exactly what you think will happen happens, good triumphs and everyone exits stronger and wiser.

But despite what the book--and its characters-- says, it makes a strong case, especially through the immediate and often searing diary entries, for the inescapable nature of repetitive family patterns. Breaking the cycle of congenital neurosis does not mean walking out of one’s skin and becoming, overnight, a better parent or more loving sister. It involves a subtler kind of change, a shift in awareness that makes one more conscious of actions that have always been automatic--thus choice becomes possible.

As Lydia lies in bed dying of cancer, she scribbles diary entries about her depression, her wild hopes of being cured, her agony at being cut down before she makes a mark in the world, or makes amends. In the end, Franks is telling us, Lydia hasn’t changed; she’s just realized a few things that might make her behave differently, if she had the chance.

What Franks needs is the confidence to rest her case with an insight like this, one with a quieter payoff than Nellie’s overnight transformation from mud hen to swan, or Augusta’s from cool career woman to passionate courtesan. These last two are the stuff of romance novels, a genre that “Wild Apples” threatens at times to tumble into. But its ambitions are bigger than that. It waxes lyrical on the power of nature and landscape to shape human life, on the sadness a mother feels for her baby’s innocence, on an old man’s bumbling attempts to communicate with his children.

Wild apples, as Augusta remembers her mother explaining, are what you get when you grow the trees from seed instead of grafting branches onto rootstock. Wild apples don’t develop properly, they don’t produce and they die young.

In the same way, Franks is saying, though families may seem at times life-threatening, we all need them to survive. They are what we spring from, what we are, what we must study and come to terms with. Franks has written a book that talks around this truth without bringing it fully alive. Next time, perhaps, she will relax her control of her material and let the drama get away from her, as it often does when families get together.