The Fragmentation of Reality : NATURAL HISTORY, <i> By Maureen Howard (W.W. Norton: $22.95; 393 pp.)</i>

“Natural History” is a novel about the dissolution of American immigrant values in the second half of the 20th Century, and of our industrial cities where those values once flourished. This, though, is like saying that Magritte’s famous painting is about a curved wooden pipe. What the painting really is about is a displacement of reality achieved by the words at the bottom: “This is not a pipe.”

Maureen Howard has tunneled beneath her story of what happens over the last 40 years to Billy and Nell Bray of Bridgeport, Conn., and their children, James and Catherine. She lays a train of metafictional gun powder that explodes and scatters the story. She is a powerful writer, and the unexploded bits are shards of a richly mordant family novel.

But Howard senses that such a thing, like Newtonian physics, is not adequate to our times, and that the reality it encapsulates accounts for too little. Unless it is disrupted, her fragmented method suggests, realism cannot convey the simultaneously horrific and trivial quality of Bridgeport’s collapse into crack houses, jobless ghettos, welfare deserts and a gutted central city over which the elevated Interstate runs, “draining life like a rubber tube.” And the lives of James and Catherine, now in their 50s--he a so-so Hollywood and television actor, she a burned-out magazine researcher who becomes a weaver--cannot be conveyed in linear novelistic terms.

For close to a century, modernists and postmodernists have taken the narrative and bent it, scrambled it, interrupted it, drugged it, argued with it or floated it away altogether: Joyce and Kafka, Pirandello and Unamuno, Georges Perec, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, to take the smallest and most random of samples. Realistic fiction goes on nevertheless, occasionally producing a masterpiece.

Howard’s method is to run chunks of straight narration and chunks of undermined narration alternately or side by side, rather chunkily. It is a hybrid and there is a justification for trying it. The result, though, is as fragmented as the method--sometimes effective and frequently laborious.

The first section of “Natural History” is a set of cameos of James’ and Catherine’s childhood. Billy, their father, is a colorful public figure, the chief detective of the county. Nell, daughter of a wealthy contractor, alternates grandiloquent dreaminess--she goes about in a sealskin coat--and hyperconscientious domesticity. She cooks prodigiously and worries about James, high-spirited and artistic, being run over as he bops around on his bicycle. It is Catherine, formidably serious, who gets hit by a car, though the injury is slight.

The deflected expectation is a key. That tight, high-powered family unit of the 1950s has all kinds of invisible breaches through which a shapeless outside world shows itself. James takes music lessons in a dark, cold house smelling of furniture wax and his Italian music teacher’s frustrations. The neighborhood fruit seller suddenly strokes Nell’s cheek. The fatherly Greek proprietor of the neighborhood store where James buys his magician’s paraphernalia is tied to the mob. And Billy has a corrupt secret.

These childhood scenes are written with a somber magic of recall. They are individually luminous. But in their perfection, there is something deliberately smothering and stagnant. It can’t be sustained; and that is Howard’s point as, in the following sections, she breaks out into a variety of styles and techniques.

They do much more than tell us a story. At times, as we shall see, they un-tell it. First, there is James at 50, living near Santa Barbara with a prosperous but unfulfilling career in second-rate films. He is married to a former rodeo star who now raises horses. His daughter, whose notebooks are quoted, is a studious adolescent who is forging a suggestive but still undefined artistic voice for the year 2000.

James spars with his wolfish producer. He is offered a lucrative television series playing an old detective. It taps the memory of his father too cheaply; instead, he returns to Bridgeport to scout out a noir-style film about a celebrated murder scandal that Billy once investigated. The producer sees box office; James sees art, the evocation of a lost place and time, and the redemption of his past.

None of this is narrated. Howard writes it as a filmed interview, with cuts, splices, a profusion of camera directions and continual shifts among levels of reality and tone. It is immensely elaborate. The purpose is to replace the richly grounded narrative of childhood with a nervous blurring of the line between what life does and what a camera does. By turns, it is glitzy cliche, wry anecdote and modest reflection.

It is immensely worked; it is hard work to follow, and the effect is to work into the ground the modestly interesting story of James’ adult life. Howard’s point is that when the world is run by hype and camera angles, these are more real than any story. Real; perhaps so, but also curiously monotonous.

The most distinctive technique comes in a central section. Howard writes her story on the right-hand pages. It tells of James’ return to Bridgeport; his encounter with Catherine, who is initially nervous that his film will uncover their father’s corruption; his brief love affair with Catherine’s house-mate, Mary, and his conclusion, after touring Bridgeport, that the past is too far gone to evoke.

Each left-hand page is a dizzying miscellany. Ranging from snippets to brief essays, there are reports on Bridgeport’s statues and bits on such natives as Robert Mitchum and Walt Kelly, Pogo’s creator. There are guidebook excerpts, a quotation from Raymond Chandler, and Lincoln praising Bridgeport’s fried oysters. There are extended passages on P. T. Barnum, the 19th-Century Bridgeport promoter and hypester who stands for both the city’s real glory and the expansive hyper-reality that would make its gritty factories die. There are engravings, doodles and diagrams.

Sometimes, James or Catherine wander briefly over from the right- hand pages, and Barnum makes sorties rightward into James’ dreams. Throughout, there is the author’s voice, standing up for her miscellanea and grumbling at the novel across the way. By double-entry-accounting principles, she insists, both sides are equal: shivaree and artistic ordering.

Maybe so, but there is a problem. Howard cites Walter Benjamin, the pre-World War II German-Jewish writer and critic, on his proposal for literature as an assortment from which readers can make their own selections and patterns. “In his Arcades project . . . Benjamin expected no less than to alter our relation to the page, to let us shop, that’s the whimsy, through his chosen topics and cultural totems.”

We can shop for oranges; we want them for themselves. Words and images have no value alone; they exist in a context of attention, the author’s. We may contest the intention, or the intention may include renouncing intention, and that, too, provides a context. It is one that fades, though, and is not susceptible to being used more than once or twice. With Benjamin, it was a scintillating exploration. In Howard’s massive application--we lurch back and forth from right-hand to left-hand pages and our attention becomes fixed mainly on when to switch--it is sheer swiveling neck work. It is too self-conscious to succeed.

The most wonderful section in the book is a relatively straightforward narrative. It tells of Catherine’s floating and tormented life in New York, and of her hard-won, triumphant stability as a spinner and weaver. After years of promiscuity and a breakdown, she is stumpy, shabby and free; a creator of beauty.

“Straightforward narrative,” of course, is a misnomer; the writing pulses around its confines like heat lightning. And it suggests the wild and floating nature of modern life more disturbingly than the more obviously experimental sections do. This is not to deny the power that breaking the narrative can have, but to venture that Howard, stumpy and fierce as her Catherine, is not particularly suited to it. Her most formidable talent seems to lie in stretching.