BOOK REVIEW : A Tide in the Affairs of Women Plays Out : FOLLY <i> by Susan Minot</i> ; Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence; $19.95; 278 pages

In “Monkeys,” her splendid first novel, Susan Minot placed a large and troubled family upon a grid of near and remote radio signals. The children received each tremor, damage and approaching disaster, sometimes clearly and sometimes in a cloudy displacement of frequencies.

In the short stories of the less successful “Lust,” it was not children receiving and decoding, but young women out in the unbounded sexual world of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. The enigmatic signals came not from their parents but from the men they were involved with.

The sexual battles that “Lust’s” protagonists puzzled over, and invariably lost, were told in graphic contemporary detail. In “Folly,” the theme is essentially the same, but the voice now has an archaic reticence. It is the story of the romantic delusions of a Boston society woman between the first and second world wars.

Minot tells it in a style that variously suggests Edith Wharton and the now-forgotten genre of middle-brow women’s fiction of the interwar period.

The Eliotts are encrusted in the leached-out world of Boston society, exclusive and bland at the same time. They have a four-story house in the Back Bay, four or five servants, and a calendar of engagements that creaks around a rusty circle. Mr. Eliott, hidebound and petulant, is an autocrat in rimless glasses who would be surprised if you called him one. Mrs. Eliott is mild and, with the help of a few drinks, mildly fey.

Lilian, their daughter, has intelligence and a certain fire. Sometimes, she feels something like a great wave inside her. Her mother, the milkman and the maids also have a wave, she is sure, but they hide it. It’s brave of them and she will learn how, she decides.

It is 1917. Walter, a New Yorker with Boston connections, comes to call just before he is to go overseas as a soldier. He is direct, impulsive and seemingly passionate, and Lilian is entranced. They have a few clandestine meetings--a hug and a kiss that Minot, in banked-down mode, makes thrilling--and then, after breaking a date or two, Walter goes off to war, writes once and goes silent. He stays in Europe and gets married.

Lilian broods and hurts. Eventually, she marries Gilbert, whose quiet manner, mild eccentricity and closed-mouth smile are, she convinces herself, signs of a great wave like hers and similarly diked in. It turns out to be a stagnant puddle, though, and their marriage proceeds dully through the years.

At one point, Gilbert has a breakdown and recovers only to turn moody and selfish as well as dull. Lilian is aimless and bored; neither her life nor her three children interest her. Only the half-acknowledged thought of Walter does. She calls it her “splinter.”

When he turns up twice over the next 20 years, there is a brief flare-up of something like passion from which he quickly retreats. At the end, at 40, she sees her dead mother’s hands at the end of her own sweater sleeves and her dead father’s face in her clock.

Minot is a greatly gifted writer who, after the family story of “Monkeys,” hasn’t found quite enough to write about. In “Lust,” she made a witty and perceptive portrait of how men make women feel. Even in a theoretically liberated time, she suggests, women are the ones who try to figure the relationship out. They suffer the weakness of having to invent the story. Her achievement was one-sided, though. The women’s psychology is brilliantly done, but the men are shadows.

Sustained mainly by her fine perceptions, the two-player game with one player peters out.

In “Folly,” something similar takes place. Minot has found a scene and time--upper-crust Boston before World War II--where the pressures of society on women are explicit. Lilian has to invent her men. Walter is no dashing seducer, but only a lazy and part-time one. Gilbert’s air of hidden mystery conceals very little and becomes simply a way of shutting her out.

True, his breakdown hints that it is not only women who are distorted and wrecked by the roles they are given. But the hint is not enough. Minot’s men are only the furniture her women trip over.

It is a tribute to the author’s skill that the constricted, old-fashioned style in which “Folly” is told works very well at the outset. Even in the explicit sexuality of “Lust” Minot has always written with fine discrimination.

For a while, the reticences of her Boston novel are cleverly used to shape the portrait of Lilian and her fetters. But once the fetters begin to hold--once she marries Gilbert--nothing essentially happens. Everyone behaves predictability and the playing-out becomes a very slow and dull game.