Making Mayhem in Ordinary Lives

She lives down a quiet dirt lane and writes in a room that overlooks a million trees--and not a single house.

The tranquillity here is almost overpowering. So, too, is the rock-solid stability that permeates this village in Southern New Hampshire where Rosellen Brown and her husband spend their summers.

And yet every morning Brown, 53, awakens with trepidation, with nightmares that dare to dance into daylight. The shriek of impending doom is not what rouses her; rather, it is the soft terror that comes from understanding just how precarious each day of life really is.

“It’s strange, because I’m a pretty buoyant person, knock wood,” Brown says. “Nothing terrible has ever happened to me.

“But I kind of have this imagination for disaster,” she says. “I really do believe in the evil eye.”

And so in her novels, normal life goes abruptly awry. Think no further than Carolyn Reiser, a pediatrician in a small New Hampshire town who is the primary character in Brown’s newest novel, “Before and After.” On duty at the town’s only clinic, Carolyn is summoned to view the hideously smashed skull of a teen-age girl. She barely has time to absorb the horror of the crime before learning that her son is the leading suspect.

One by one, each of the Reisers--Carolyn, her sculptor husband Ben and their children Jacob and Judith--deals with the disaster. It should be a time of family accord, of pulling together. But any prayer of unity splinters.

John Glusman, Brown’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said the “raw nerve” of the author’s scenario was what attracted him to the manuscript. Even now, Glusman said, months after his duties as editor have ended, the moral and emotional quandary of the Reiser family still haunts him.

“This is one of those books where there are no easy answers,” Glusman said.

Some critics have faulted Brown for creating cardboard crises, for imbuing her stories with soap-operatic overtones. But others laud her efforts. Writer Cynthia Ozick praises Brown for her ability to “engender and render five emotions simultaneously.”

Brown’s intense familiarity with the rhythm of small-town life in New England helps to make the story compelling. Although she teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Houston, Brown and her husband Marv Hoffman, a writer and high school teacher, lived for 11 years in the Peterborough area. They raised their two daughters in just the kind of environment that surrounds Jacob and Judith Reiser.

For a time, they lived in the very house where Brown has installed the fictional Reisers. She shopped at their grocery store, went to their bank, waited in line at their post office and, once a year, stuck out her arm at the annual Red Cross blood drive that Carolyn Reiser helps to oversee.

Like her make-believe characters, the Hoffman-Browns occupied a marginal position in their community: a Jewish family in a Protestant stronghold. Brown herself recalls the occasion soon after they had settled in Peterborough when her husband asked a town scion if their religion would be “a problem” in an enclave of Protestant tradition.

On the contrary, he was told, “you’ll be seen as wonderful assets to the town--until something happens.”

Living in a town of 5,000, where on any day “you can see all the players on the score card,” Brown says, “my own relationship to the place has always been slightly to the side--as a writer, and as a Jew, someone who didn’t have grandparents living up the road.”

But this peripheral vision benefited Brown, enabling her to see the workings of a part of America that, for all the new yuppie accessory stores, remains frozen in a peculiar warp of time and values.

“You know people in a great many roles in a small town. You know everyone in a kind of multilayered way,” Brown says. “That just doesn’t happen in a city.”

By extension, “here is a place where everything you do casts a shadow. You tend to be very visible, and you tend to be part of a real nexus of concern.”

In Brown’s rendering, the crisis faced by the Reisers turns them into pariahs. Overnight, the townspeople respond to these once-respectable citizens as protectors of a monster, the probable killer of a teen-age girl who in death becomes saintly.

The levels of conflict faced in particular by Carolyn--as mother, wife and physician--made “Before and After” a hot movie property before it had even come out in galley editions. Brian Lord, an agent at the Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills, confirmed that Meryl Streep is “attached to” the project and will play Carolyn Reiser in a movie to be produced by TriStar Pictures and to be written by Ted Tally, author of the screenplay for “The Silence of the Lambs.” Recent reports have also linked Robert De Niro to the project.

For Brown there is some irony in seeing a book of hers finally turned into a movie. An earlier novel, “Tender Mercies,” came out several years before the movie of the same name--and as it happened, bore nothing more than the name in common with the film.

“It turns out you can’t copyright a title,” says Brown, who playfully describes her novel as “Tender-Mercies-Not-the-Movie.”

A subsequent Brown novel, “Civil Wars” (1984) also focuses on, as one review put it, “what happens to families when a wheel comes off.” In writing about how the civil rights movement fractured an old Southern family, Brown once again drew from her own experience--in this case, three years of teaching at a predominantly black college in a town called Tougaloo, just north of Jackson, Miss.

She writes about these precipice moments in life, Brown says, because “your life, if you are lucky, is a series of averted catastrophes.”

And parental responsibility, as she has repeatedly demonstrated in her novels, looms as any family’s greatest challenge.

“What it comes down to, finally, is: How responsible are you for your children?” Brown asks.

Her own answer is, “You do the best you can, and you pray. You struggle with the fact that we are taught to be attentive to our children but not intrusive.”

What also surfaces in her work is the dangerous edge that all families walk--consciously or unconsciously--at one time or another.

“What protects you? What protects any of us?” Brown muses. “Serendipity? Good fortune? Maybe so, but those are the same things that doom you. Cosmic justice just doesn’t exist. Nothing is ever promised.”

Brown may be quick to elaborate on the themes of her writing. But as to why she writes at all, she remains baffled. “It’s the one absolutely unanswerable element of my life,” she says.

Perhaps, says Brown, only partly in jest, she is “placating the angry gods by throwing them a little red meat in my books”--staving off real-life disasters by committing them to paper instead.

Brown shrugs. “I just don’t know what makes the mind of a writer. But what I know about life,” she says, “is that you think you have control--and you don’t.”