FICTION

DUCK AND COVER by Brenda Peterson (HarperCollins : $20 ; 254 pp. ). There is a Cold War raging inside the family Brenda Peterson writes about, a family raised on a belief in the real one: Mom has CIA clearance, Dad is a diplomat, and their son, Davy, is a fighter pilot; if sisters Sydney and Tia, lacking top-security clearance, would be left behind in a nuclear attack, they share the family’s apocalyptic attitude, what Sydney calls an “emergency personality.” The story of “Duck and Cover” is deceptively slight--Sydney is fed up with her mother’s totalitarian regime; the cracks in the family veneer widen and then are repaired--and it is rather strange to be faced with a story whose stunning denouement involves nothing more than the decision to spend money on a medical professional.

Still, Peterson is a hauntingly funny writer, who manages to flip back and forth between wry absurdity and heartbreak without ever losing her rhythm. She manages to diminish the hysteria surrounding events like the Cuban missile crisis, as she inflates the significance of what is really nothing more than a standard assortment of disaffected middle-class characters. The balance she strikes is almost hypnotic.