BOOK REVIEW : Second Novel Strikes a Superficial Note : GHOST NOTE, <i> by Zena Collier,</i> Grove, Weidenfeld, $19.95; 210 pages

In “Ghost Note,” a second novel by Zena Collier, Charlie Hazzard resurfaces in the lives of his three daughters 30-odd years after having abandoned them and their mother in a small western New York town. The occasion of his return is the recent death of their mother, Fay Hazzard, and although Charlie’s initial reception is anything but warm, he ends up staying long enough to help his estranged daughters settle Fay’s and their affairs.

Charlie is a mystery to Lois and Diane, who remember him chiefly as a man who played the piano and then went away forever. He is a complete stranger to Ella, their mentally handicapped younger sister, who takes an instant liking to him though she has no idea he is her father. Only Lois, the firstborn, can remember what her father was like in those long-ago early years. She would wake late at night to the sound of his playing and “lying in the dark moved her hands in time to the music and pictured herself twirling, dancing, skirt flaring out like a ballerina’s.”

“Ghost Note” focuses on Charlie’s reconciliation with Lois and Diane and shows how the father’s return brings about solutions to the problems his children are suffering. Written in a psychologically realistic style, the story works best when Collier is observing the subtle emotional shifts that Lois and Diane experience, although the banality of their lives (Fay, like her daughters, was abandoned by her father) and a few weak plot devices mitigate against this strength.

Lois, who was married young to a considerably older man, has become obsessed with her son, Ned, who had a nervous breakdown when a long-term love affair ended abruptly. An undeveloped character, his presence in the story chiefly serves to provide a focus for what amounts to an abrupt climax toward novel’s end. That climax, a serious car accident en route to a rendezvous with Ned, leaves too many emotional loose ends to be satisfying.

A similarly shadowy character is Adam, the man who wants to marry the thirtysomething Diane, although she has been unable to make a commitment to a man, to what she calls “this business of every day. Where you lived, whom you lived with, what you worked at, played at. She’d waited for it to happen with Adam, but it hadn’t so far.”

Moreover, Charlie Hazzard’s explanation for having abandoned his family seems trite: Fay wanted him to give up his incipient career as a jazz pianist, so he felt he had to leave, had to go in search of “my identity, my reason for being.”

Later, after “finding” himself in a new life at a hotel in Southern California, he tried to contact his children but was cut off, again, by Fay. At which point “the mental pictures he had of Fay and the children began to fade” like “snippets from an old movie or passages from a book read in early youth.”

What emerges is a referendum on Fay’s character in which Fay becomes the real cause of everybody’s problems. Although she is not there to defend herself, although she stayed home and raised those children alone, Fay becomes the villain who drove and kept Charlie away.

Thus, Lois has a sudden reversal of opinion midway through the novel: “Suddenly, as though a curtain had risen at the theater, she saw them all as players acting out the roles in which Fay had cast them. They could make no moves, speak no lines, except as Fay assigned them. She and Diane were the avengers. Charles was the heavy, to be punished in perpetuity for his sins and for those of Fay’s father.” The result is a story that never quite rises above an analyst’s couch view of a dysfunctional family.

In American life today, single-parent families are increasingly the norm. Quite often, these are families headed by women and abandoned by fathers who seem to have stayed just long enough for the children to vaguely remember them as ghosts in the night who came and dandled and argued and then disappeared. Although “Ghost Note” succeeds in portraying some of the complicated feelings children might have when this happens, in the end Collier lacks the metaphoric power she needs to soar above the easy psychological explanations for which she settles.