BOOK REVIEW : The Selections and Rejections of Life : SARAH’S LAUGHTER AND OTHER STORIES <i> by Susan Engberg</i> , Alfred A. Knopf, $18, 194 pages

If there’s a single sentence that captures the tone of this book, it’s one character’s cheerless self-description in “The Edge of Town.” Judith, home with the kids, has just learned that her husband is less interested in the family than she had imagined, leading Judith to curl up under a quilt and think, “Maybe she would never be done with this process of being born.”

The theme runs through this entire collection, Susan Engberg’s third; an ongoing dissatisfaction with life, a sense that some ill-defined promise has been broken. Engberg’s characters, mostly women, stand on the verge of depression but dare not fall into the abyss, knowing the cost such a plunge would extract from unwitting children, husbands, lovers and parents. And so they endure, melancholic at the realization that their choices have become so abbreviated.

The title story is untypical, being a novella and revolving around a man, but it, too, explores the problem inherent in the act of choosing--that selection cannot occur without rejection.

Thomas Burden--the name tells you Engberg isn’t a particularly subtle writer--is a retired newspaper book review editor, and a lifetime of judging others’ work has left him a physical wreck. “It wears you out, all that discrimination,” he says, sounding like a John Simon protege when he goes on to argue that a critic “has a responsibility to stamp out what is irresponsible, what is really bad.”

What’s worse for Thomas’ family is that this need to discriminate has been absorbed into his very bones, like some cancer, to the point that Thomas has become incapable of emotional connection.

Thomas’ daughter Martha and ex-wife Sarah both want to make peace with him, and hope to do so during a respite at the country home of Sarah’s new husband.

Thomas spontaneously pushes them away, however, threatened by their free will. When Martha informs him on the drive up that she’s decided to become a single parent, he responds, “How can you be thinking of having a child when you have a car that look like yours does inside?” Martha, with more understanding than Thomas deserves, tells her father “I don’t have any more time to be afraid of your scorn.”

The family eventually makes peace, but the reconciliation is so sentimental and unconvincing it reminds one far too much of “On Golden Pond.”

Engberg’s shorter stories are more satisfying, largely because she handles female characters better than men. For many, motherhood is at the core of their being, not only in their daily existence but in their imaginations as well. In “Smart Baby,” the menopausal narrator finds herself dreaming of an infant who doesn’t take his mother for granted, who can actually say, “Good milk.”

Though Engberg’s women may have jobs, they work in the traditional female employment ghetto--waitressing, teaching, administrating--without fulfillment, spending their free time thinking of lovers and children. Indeed, most seem hardly to have identities outside their families. The college-age son of the “Smart Baby” narrator says, “Mom, what you stand for is Sunday morning,” and the description suits her perfectly.

The most memorable story in “Sarah’s Laughter” is “The Dead Also Eat,” in which a young waitress, Nan, discovers she can’t bear to serve an old, smelly, apparently demented woman.

Nan doesn’t at first admit it, but the woman reminds Nan of her own mother, of whom she was terribly afraid. Bringing her breakfast in the morning every day for years, Nan had to be prepared for “whatever degree of disturbance I would find behind the door of her room.”

The old woman resembles Nan’s mother, but the fact that she praises Nan’s service, even though she delivers only a hot dog, is just enough to give Nan a sense that things change, that it is possible to cope with life.

Coping--that is, in the final analysis, what the stories in “Sarah’s Laughter” are about, how sensitive souls deal with a world that doesn’t seem to value them.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “The Lilac Bus” by Maeve Binchy (Delacorte).