BOOK REVIEW : ‘Searoad’: Beautiful but Fractured Tales : SEAROAD: Chronicles of Klatsand <i> By Ursula K. LeGuin</i> , HarperCollins, $19.95, 208 pages

Something unfortunate happens when the structure of a book competes with its content, leaving the reader as distanced from the characters as a tourist is from the natives. She can see them, observe their habits, listen to their conversations, but that is not the same as experiencing their daily lives.

In “Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand,” Ursula K. LeGuin allows readers to spend a little time with the inhabitants of this Oregon seaside resort town (which often seems a little worse for wear) but always with the sense that their guide will leave one day soon and return to her own life, leaving the Klatsanders behind--though not entirely forgotten.

LeGuin’s book is a puzzling mix of short stories, character sketches, brief fiction and novella. Through its fractured narrative, the characters are presented by fits and starts; some sections achieve the fullness of a traditional short story while others are mere flashes, caught in the midst of someone’s life. Each piece is beautifully written and realized; unfortunately, the transitions between these moments are troubling.

LeGuin does well with the small, telling details: a misplaced key, a coffee-shop table that significantly stands out from the rest, small clay houses, a young man’s sobbing heard through a wall, the unfinished curtains in a failing motel.

The moments of understanding in the lives of the characters are also wonderful: A story called “Quoits” explores the limits of language in expressing what one person may actually mean to another. A grown daughter, attending the funeral of her mother, makes the mistake of referring to her mother’s longtime companion as her “lover,” only to have her mother’s friend reply, “There aren’t any words that mean anything. For us. For any of us. We can’t say who we are. . . . Wife, husband, lover, ex, post, step, it’s all leftovers, words from some other civilization, nothing means anything.”

“Sleepwalkers” resembles a series of character sketches, with each new character introduced in the previous character’s “biography.” It begins with a visiting writer observing the maid at his motel, a woman named Ava Evans who, the writer initially thinks, would make a good character in a play. Then he quickly dismisses the thought by saying, “She’d be completely impossible in a play, because she never does or says anything but what everyone else does or says. . . . People like her don’t take any control over their lives.” The writer is not only arrogant but also wrong, for Ava is very much the mistress of her own fate, a fact revealed with each successive character’s story.

The final tale in “Searoad” is a novella called “Hernes,” told in the voices of four generations of women, roughly spanning 100 years of personal and local history. The narrative gracefully moves from one woman to the next, following its own non-linear chronology (as if memories are always meant to be related randomly; that in itself forms a peculiar logic). Virginia Herne, the youngest of the women, has written a Pulitzer Prize-winning poem entitled “Persephone Turning.” The Persephone myth is woven throughout her narrative sections as she relates the facts of her life, shaded by Persephone’s own tale of abduction, rape, rebirth and happiness. The cyclical life that Persephone leads (repeated each year) mirrors the lives of the Hernes--deaths and births, mothers and daughters--as well as Klatsand itself, with the sea running in and out, the seasonal changes and the re-emergence of the tourists each summer.

All of which lends this story a feeling of life--not too exciting or hurried, but constant, inescapable, as if LeGuin’s characters submit to biological imperatives rather than making conscious, intellectual or emotional choices. From the first title, “Foam Women and Rain Women,” the idea seems to hum through the book that the citizens of Klatsand are inseparable from their landscape.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Postcards” by E. Annie Proulx (Scribner’s).