How It Was in West Texas : WALKING DUNES, <i> By Sandra Scofield (The Permanent Press: $21.95; 247 pp.)</i>

In “Walking Dunes,” her wonderfully evocative third novel, Sandra Scofield offers up a bleak, barren, moon-surface of a landscape, the rolling sand dunes of the West Texas plains, as backdrop for this introspective odyssey of a young man playing out his last year in high school.

The year is 1958--a year in a decade too much glorified and overrated in bad old sitcoms. In the small town of Basin, life is throwing sand and grit into everyone’s face and nature doesn’t help: “In August, color was forgotten. There was no blue, no green, no true yellow. Sand was a color, heat was a color.”

Protagonist David Puckett is drowning in unhappiness. Like many another miserable 18-year-old, he envies “ordinary families,” and undoubtedly imagines that he was switched in the cradle and should really have been born the prince that he deserves to be.

Father Saul, a displaced New Yorker, is a bitter and complex man who works, desultorily, as a local tailor by day and spends the rest of his time rereading the Russian classics and harassing his family. He ladles out chess strategies and sarcasm in equal measure. “Anything could provoke him; he seemed always poised on the cusp of a tirade.”

The tirades already have driven a daughter out of the house and into a loveless marriage with a third-rate disc jockey who will leave her when she becomes pregnant. David’s mother is a defeated woman whose saving grace is that she is effective, patient and kind in her job as charge nurse on the night shift of the hospital’s psychiatric ward. David is at his nicest when he helps her on her rounds and befriends “a little lost bird of a girl” whose life is in a shambles.

Crammed together in a small, disorderly disaster of a house, they can’t escape one another. Endless bickering is fueled by gin and bourbon, while cardboard cartons of forgotten TV dinners puddle on the kitchen table.

David escapes to tennis and girls. In the fiery heat of summer, he and his pal Ellis “played the game like a giant Ping-Pong match that lasted two years.”

His girlfriends are either desirable or disposable, depending upon his testosterone level, his yearning for intellectual companionship or his penchant for a fast climb up the social ladder. He “waffles and wavers,” trying to decide upon the flavor of the week. He’s not very nice to his buddies, either. Though he loves them, he uses them to hang out with when there’s nothing better to do--then drops them when he’s summoned to play fill-in tournament tennis at the local country club.

The author has a finely tuned ear and eye for all the cadences and nuances of high school. On opening day, the whole caste system is laid out for us, complete with clothes, attitudes and territory. “Students stood in clots, mostly boys with boys, and girls with girls. They were further divided by that elusive but unmistakably effective system that created layers of popularity and status in the school’s society.” Never missing a beat, she fetchingly recaptures all the flotsam and jetsam minutiae. It’s as though she had just walked out the door 15 minutes ago.

David fancies himself a writer but just plays with the idea of it. He takes up speech/debate (maybe he’ll be a lawyer?). When this too palls, he tries out for drama, gets the lead in “Antigone” and finds a soul mate in leading lady Patsy Randall, a pale, serious girl who introduces him to Billie Holiday and Miles Davis but freezes up when he makes a pass at her.

No better, no worse, than most of the rest of us at that age, David wants it all to fall into his lap, but doesn’t want to pay the piper. He’s probably never going to be a writer. He’s probably going to end up with the wrong girl.

Nonetheless, the novel is a terrific read, stylishly written, at times lyrical. Scofield must have had a brother, or two or three. She has an uncanny talent for crawling inside the confused mind of a young man coming to grips with his life’s first watershed.