BOOK REVIEW : Seeing the Universe in Little Things : EVERY DAY DOUGHNUTS, <i> by Patrice Adcroft,</i> St. Martin’s Press, $18.95; 256 pages

Student writers often aspire to the universal and, in doing so, they wipe out their specifics.

Beginning writers hate to tell you the town they’re writing about, or the country, or even--sometimes--the planet. They don’t want to tell you about the weather, or what people eat, or what they’re wearing, because they don’t want to be shackled by time, place or circumstance.

An excellent student writer I know was recently greatly peeved when I guessed that the town he was writing about was Julian. He didn’t want to write about Julian , with its pretty Victorian houses and its apple orchards and its homemade cider: He was aiming instead for the Universe.

But working writers know that you only get to the universal through the specific: The cockroaches scuttling under the wallpaper, the chunks of sturgeon floating in watery soup, the sound of a cam shaft thunking through a VW bug engine--all the really great stuff that tells us we’re alive.

Patrice Adcroft, former editor-in-chief of Omni magazine, has written a first novel that gives us the perfect gift, the perfect experience: She knows something that many of us do not, and she writes meticulously and affectionately about what she knows. She presents us with a beautiful world, perfectly defined.

Every Day Doughnuts is “an 18-stool, five coffee-pot shop in Scranton, Pa.” The shop is close to a Buick dealership, so “the Buick Boys” always come in. There’s a glove factory down the street and a handbag factory as well.

Church-going ladies stop by Every Day Doughnuts for breakfast; telephone operators drop in after their night shift. There are bakers here, of course, and the shop has its outside salesmen who make runs to supermarkets, mom-and-pop stores, anyone who needs the reassuring sweetness of a sugar doughnut.

Adcroft shows us the whole doughnut life cycle here, from the very beginnings of a pre-dawn mixture of water and yeast right through to the big bags of “stales” that are picked up once a week by a “pig lady” who feeds them to her hungry swine in the firm belief that they give their flesh a particularly sweet and delicate taste and aroma.

It more or less goes without saying that the waitresses, bakers, custodians and salesmen who work at Every Day Doughnuts are not prestigious in the Larger World’s eyes. But the author shows her characters complete respect and does not condescend to them in any way.

Chapter by chapter, she takes us into their lives--Marie Eden, who has a deformed foot, is pushing 50 but decides to get married because “maybe one, two people really know you your whole life. If you’re very lucky.” Or Terri Kudja, who belly dances to make extra money and has a four-armed goddess she sets great store by; she chants, meditates, keeps a naive and hopeful list of goals. She needs to get her kids out of the projects, and she’ll do it too.

There’s a wonderful 17-year-old boy here who’s madly, madly in love with an older woman who, in turn, is getting ready to dump him. How can he live through this unbearable tragedy? (The fact that the tragedy is played out in a living room where the only furniture is a coffee table is incidental. It’s his transforming passion that counts and makes him human.)

To any students who may be reading this: It’s the doughnuts that make this story universal. Through the making of the batter, the craft in cooking them just long enough, the fact that “things rise here,” through yeast and sugar and care and cleanliness, we get to see the larger redemptive power of hard work and craft.

When we hear Marcus, the down-and-out salesman, entertain people for hours about the eight months he lived under a bridge, we see the universal power, the absolutely redemptive power of narration.

When an office clerk (nicknamed “the professor” because he works in the admissions office of a university) is tormented by the repeated extremely mean question, “Why don’t you kill yourself?” we see the power of the word in another way. And when the manager’s daughter changes shifts to work those long last hours before the shop closes at 8 at night, we know as much as Jean Paul Sartre ever knew about the elasticity of time, as much as Gazarian knew in “Catch 22.” If you hate what you’re doing, time stands still.

Sure, no one is dying to work in a doughnut shop. But there’s life in this place. It is a place where everybody knows your name.

This is a great first novel. All of us are lucky when they come out. The world becomes a slightly better place. And the author has totally mastered one of literature’s great lessons: The doughnuts first , and then the Universe! Not the other way around.