‘Simple Living’ Has Few Simple Answers : SIMPLE LIVING: ONE COUPLE’S SEARCH FOR A BETTER LIFE, <i> By Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska,</i> Viking, $20, 236 pages

‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free,” goes the Shaker song. This is the story of one young Los Angeles couple who decided that the way to become more free was to simplify.

Increasingly successful yet increasingly miserable, Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska drove away from two rooms in Westwood to a farmhouse in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Levering, 34, a product of Wesleyan and Harvard Divinity School, worked on 15 movie scripts in his seven years in Los Angeles. Wanda Urbanska, 30, a Harvard graduate and child of college professors, was a business reporter for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and author of “The Singular Generation,” a book on young people in the ‘80s.

Frank is the youngest of six children of Sam and Miriam Levering, who had run the orchard in Orchard Gap, Va., a town too small to appear on the map, for nearly 50 years.

Sam’s heart surgery brought Frank back to direct the apple harvest. That led to a deal that resulted in the escape from Los Angeles. In three years, in return for their work, Frank and Wanda would own the Leverings’ 90 acres of cherry, peach, nectarine and apple trees.

Will the sophisticated young couple find the simple life they seek in Orchard Gap? Will they like the simple life? More practically, will they be able to get out from under the orchard’s debt?

One of the problems with this basically good-hearted and thought-provoking book is that the reader has to dig to find the answers to these questions.

It turns out that in the years from 1986 and 1989, the Leverings were able to make a small profit. They also managed to reduce the orchard’s debt.

Do the two find satisfaction in plain living? Despite some bumps in transition (pangs of envy when a friend calls up from the Coast to tell them about his new job as a Disney executive) they like country life. They prefer cold spring water to Evian in plastic, summer corn and tomatoes growing near the kitchen to chic urban restaurants.

In fact to the Leverings, almost anything would be better than the city. “In Los Angeles we had lived fast but not well,” they write.

They were exhausted by work, equally fatigued by the strained social life that seemed necessary to find more work. Scything the tall grass away from the apple trunks one spring day in Orchard Gap, Frank realized that he was really happy. Living simply is, however, extremely hard. Frank worked in the orchard six 12-hour days a week in the spring (planting, fertilizing, spraying, mowing) and summer (harvesting).

Wanda worked the cash register during cherry and peach harvest, 10 weeks a year, spending the rest of her work time writing. Frank wrote in the winter.

Their dual professions, their computers in the farmhouse basement, take the edge off the suspense in “Simple Living.” The writers, and therefore the readers, aren’t wholeheartedly caught up in the question of the orchard’s success.

Frank and Wanda seem to spend more time thinking about the paths to a simpler life than actually immersing themselves in it. As part of their thinking, they take time out from Orchard Gap to visit other people living simple lives.

These side trips to simple-living folk (including the founders of Habitat for Humanity and two carpenter-nuns who fell in love at a convent) leave hanging the reader’s questions about the orchard.

Frank and Wanda’s thinking includes an honest look at the flaws in their “Fruitopia.” (That’s the name Frank’s mother uses, without irony.) They explain such compromises as having to use fungicide to fight the apple scab and brown rot that grow in the rainy season.

But a larger question comes to mind. What about those people who get thrown into the simple life rather than choosing it?

If you had a couple of children to support and had just been fired, how would you feel reading the following: “We’ve also learned just how much fun it is to be bargain hunters, to buy on sale and in bulk, to haunt thrift stores and resale shops, yard sales and remnant houses. We go out of our way to find the sport--even the adventure--in being frugal.”

Frank and Wanda also find the adventure in switching to powdered milk, in washing plastic wrap for reuse and in sleeping in their Chevy rather than spending money on hotels. “Why it’s uplifting is a tantalizing question,” they write.

The word uplifted appears several times; Frank and Wanda have found religion in simplicity. Their decision to settle for Wanda’s mother’s drab 1980 Chevy Malibu leads to a sermon on the freedom of having a dented car that needs no alarm system.

Undented cars, they say, and other examples of “perfection in the consumer culture and in personal appearance” are “a tainted ideal--an island of self-indulgence on a planet crying out for help. . . .”

“ ‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘Tis a gift to be free’ ” goes the Shaker song, and it continues, “ ‘Tis a gift to come down where you want to be.” Frank and Wanda’s book-length hymn to simplicity would be a more inspiring guide if it showed an understanding of where other people want to be.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Seize the Moment” by Richard Nixon (Simon and Schuster).