BOOK REVIEW : ‘Chapel Street’: An Unfulfilled Promise : CHAPEL STREET <i> by Sam North</i> ; Grove Weidenfeld; $18.95, 254 pages

Mrs. Gorse, the elderly, flighty landlady who owns the shabby-genteel boarding house in which this novel takes place, at one point imparts her theory of life to a young lodger.

“Your future is like a cake,” she says, “a piece of cake that’s made especially for you. But you have to eat it, whether you like it or not. If you are hungry, the cake is delicious. If you are not hungry, the cake makes you sick and ill. Understand? A purpose in life gives you hunger, it gives you a reason to eat the cake.”

Mrs. Gorse has managed, as is her habit, to make a certain amount of sense in this short sermon despite her efforts to be perfectly opaque. The source of her concern is clear, too: most of her tenants--or “guests,” as she calls her favorites, fantasizing that they pay for their rooms solely out of good will--are lost souls, physically functional but emotionally fragile.

Thrown together in this live-in melting pot, the characters in “Chapel Street,” Sam North’s second novel, are forced to begin the process of figuring out just who they are, just what they should do with their lives.

That’s what we expect them to do, at least, given North’s setting of the stage, but in fact his characters never become more than assemblages of quirky idiosyncrasies. North seems to be more concerned with his own writing than with his characters’ development, and the result is that “Chapel Street” seems aimless, a piece of cake that’s relatively easy to put aside.

Not that North’s characters are dull. There’s Mrs. Gorse, naturally, who says of a certain item of kitchen furniture, “It’s a bloody miracle first, then it’s a table afterward.”

There’s Gabriella, the Italian girl attracted only to men who frighten her; beautiful Julia, the late arrival who has just left her husband; Marek, irresistible yet simultaneously impervious to women, putting all his intellectual romanticism into music. And, most important, there are Skim and Santay, polar opposites whose needs and hopes ensure that relationships among the lodgers are always in flux.

Skim is angry and defiant, “glad to be imprisoned inside his character . . . because it stopped him from falling for anything, neither love, nor religion, nor belief in humankind’s greatness.” Santay is likewise imprisoned, less by his wheelchair, the result of a motorcycle accident, than by his own and others’ assumptions about his disability.

Santay is the central character in “Chapel Street,” for he plays a peripheral but important role in the many love triangles around which the novel is structured. It proves an unhappy position, however: Although Santay is flattered that Gabriella and Julia treat him as a confidante, he is frustrated even more by their believing him to be harmless, brotherly, asexual.

Gabriella tells Santay about her crush on Marek, Julia tells him about her marriage and then Skim’s crush on her. “Well, if there were any justice, it should be impossible to fall in love with someone who isn’t in love with you,” Julia tells Santay. “No wonder triangles are eternal! Such a piled-up mess! Sex and children and money and vanity and power. . . . I just want to cancel, I don’t want any of it, no choices, no desires or achievements.”

It’s a moving passage, for Santay has far more cause to complain in this (and many other regards) than Julia, for whom the dramatization of troubles is a luxury.

When the residents are forced to leave the boarding house, Skim having discovered its electrical wiring to be hazardous, the novel appears headed toward some illuminating crisis. In fact, however, the characters carry on much as before, having learned little more than love hurts. Skim, toward the end of the novel, is “low enough to recognize that there came a point where you got so low that you just dropped and fell.”

Marek, at the very end, finds he has “never known such an inward, personal unhappiness. It gripped so persistently. Was this it, was he going to have to live with this?” These passages, like most of “Chapel Street,” are nicely written, but Skim and Marek haven’t generated enough sympathy in the reader that one feels for their distress.

The basic problem with the novel is that North doesn’t make enough of Santay. Skim and Marek gain rudimentary emotional lives in the course of “Chapel Street,” but Santay, more complex to begin with, is left to struggle without progress. This difference in development is no doubt intentional, but it causes problems of its own; when the reader is with Marek and Skim, he’d rather be--unlike Gabriella and Julia, apparently--with Santay.

It’s Santay, not Mrs. Gorse, who holds the boarding house together, and one finishes the novel feeling that Santay has been shortchanged, his role underplayed for no good reason.

North, whose first novel, “Automatic Man,” won the 1990 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction, has created a promising situation but doesn’t make the most of the opportunity.