BOOK REVIEW : Obsessions of Childhood Resurface in a Series of Fuzzy Family Photos : A HANDBOOK FOR DROWNING<i> Stories by David Shields</i> Alfred A. Knopf $19; 178 pages

What happens to a smudge-eyed, circuit-overloaded Sendak child when he gets to be 20 or so?

No longer is it enough to be what his parents have done to him. No longer is it enough to be a goad on the world’s conscience. To keep, past its time, an identity as innocent victim produces moral festering. Grief becomes grievance.

The smudged eye turns into the eye that smudges what it sees. Clinging to the child role of bearing witness to itself, it doesn’t undertake the adult role of bearing witness to everything else.

Walter, the protagonist and pretty much the point of view in these 24 pieces by David Shields, struggles with the constraints, dead spots and obsessions that he brings along from his childhood.

The stories, most of them very short, are like knotholes through which he peers at different stages of his growing up. The struggling bears the foreknowledge of its own failure and seems almost to take comfort from it; the peering seeks not discovery so much as confirmation.

In snapshots and vignettes, scrambled in time, we see Walter and his family over the years. Sylvia and Leonard, his parents, are liberal intellectuals. Sylvia was an active journalist until she became a mother; after that, between struggles with a recurring cancer that eventually kills her, she worked zealously for all kinds of good public causes.

Leonard, whose disciplined physical fitness was a perpetual reproach to Sylvia’s semi-invalidism, publishes labor-movement articles, worships Eugene Debs, perpetually re-fights the Rosenberg trial and dreams of being Albert Camus and writing for Le Combat. His thwarted political-romantic dreams edged his kindness with a harsh streak; they intensified the gnawing--if not of Sylvia’s cancer, of her feelings of inadequacy.

Shields darts in and out of the lives of these four people--Walter has an older sister, Ellen, though she hardly figures--varying not only the chronology but also the focus. There is a sketch of his family’s well-meaning efforts to deal with black people. Sylvia gets her day helper, Virginia, to stay an extra half-hour over cookies and milk, just so they can get to know each other. Virginia charges for the extra time.

“Lies” is an account of young Walter’s unpredictable experiences, as he grows up, at variously telling the truth and not telling it. He can get in trouble either way. It is a bit pat and predictable; so is an account of his druggy, free-swinging, activist high school days in the ‘60s and his contrasting time at Brown University. There, he leaves a picket line to play Frisbee. “That, for me, was the end of the ‘60s,” is his mediocre comment.

His mother’s weakness is a perpetual threat. She lies down a lot, is anxious but distant and lets herself be bullied. At the beach, the energetic and faintly sadistic Leonard insists she go swimming; she almost drowns. Returning from the hospital after a successful operation, she brings everyone presents, as if to apologize. The gesture fails; Leonard and the children examine their presents and go their ways. It is as if Sylvia lacked enough reality to fill the hole left by her own absence.

Young Walter tells about her cancer to upstage a playmate who boasts of his rudimentary sexual experiments. Sex is a problem; a disastrous venture in a massage parlor leaves Walter, for the moment, “repelled by the prospect of physical love.” Later, he will have an affair with Nina, a college mate. He is possessive and tiresomely urgent, but there is less real ardor in it than a nervous flailing for power.

As time passes, it seems to Walter that the family dragons are dozing a little. He tells of an outing to the Great Salt Lake that starts as the familiar gnawing horror and ends surprisingly happily. He tells of the last year or two of his mother’s life, when she and Leonard, the children gone, live out a peaceful and companionable routine.

But these are fugitive glimpses. Walter lacks all appetite and is unappeased. After his mother’s death, he goes through her papers. They are impersonal records of her public activities and, in her obituary, tributes from her former colleagues. The only clue to anything beyond that is a lushly mournful poem by Thomas Moore that she had kept.

“Walter wished and wished and wished that on the night of his conception (and on subsequent days and nights) his mother and father had communicated to each other (and thus to him) not that the body was moral, which it wasn’t, but that it was mortal, only mortal, and that the active love wasn’t one more good deed but a riot of feelings, for if they had, if they only had, he would have become (he was virtually certain of it) a more imaginative person than he was now.”

But they hadn’t, and he didn’t. It is the book’s truth, but it is also its limitation. Cramped, Walter tells a cramped story. The glimpses we get, varied and subtle as they may be, are all gray. It is the grayness of life seen through a caul that has never been shed.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “The Summer of the Royal Visit” by Isabel Colgate (Knopf).