BOOK REVIEW : When Love Grows in Different Directions : MYSTERY RIDE by Robert Boswell ; Alfred A. Knopf; $22; 334 pages

Buying a farm in Iowa was to be a pastoral interlude for Stephen and Angela Landis; a bridge between the mellow activism of the ‘60s and a yuppie future in professional careers. Stephen, to his own surprise and Angela’s dismay, set down roots; there was nothing that so fulfilled him as the punishment and satisfaction of raising cattle.

After a half-dozen years and the birth of a daughter, they broke up. Stephen remained, struggling to support his farming with a full-time job in the local hardware store. Angela moved to California, remarried and went to work in a local center for social work and peace activism. It was a loving separation and remains one. Angela had let Stephen keep the farm. What she took, he reflects early in “Mystery Ride,” was what he most wanted: “Her sweet and rapturous heart.”

The phrase is unfortunate. It is an example of writer Robert Boswell’s occasional over-ripeness of diction and forcing of sentiment, the equivalent of a winemaker adding sugar to raise the kick.

To be sure, the writing is generally better than that. The main difficulty is that the phrase highlights the imbalance in a story of two people in each of whom love and life move in contradictory directions. Stephen, thoughtfully portrayed, allows us to believe in his regret. What is less believable is the sweet and rapturous heart. Angela is a prolonged emotional effort, a punishing and self-punishing nervous energy that doesn’t manage to inhabit a person.

The main action of “Mystery Ride” takes place 10 years after the breakup. Dulcie, the Landis’ daughter, has turned 15, and Angela finds her unmanageable. Stephen agrees to take her for awhile. Angela and Dulcie go on a hectic drive to the farm where Stephen’s lover, Leah, and her daughter Roxanne, have just moved in. There is a strained and intense reunion; Angela returns to California, and Dulcie, angry and rebellious, stays on for awhile and then goes back West. By the time the book ends, she will be with her father, more mature but still turbulent.

The comings and goings allow Stephen and Angela to try to sift the meaning of their lives and contradictions. They intercut with flashbacks and with accounts of the people around them. There is Angela’s second husband, Quin, a kindly and floating man who is a Hollywood agent. He floats into a furtive affair with Sdrina, a kind of stock-vampire figure who is passionate, possessive and lives in a trailer.

Leah is brisk, insubstantial and patient with the tempestuous presence of Angela and Dulcie. She moves out after Roxanne becomes pregnant by Will, a neighbor’s son, marries him and gives birth to a premature baby who dies young. Will’s parents are born-again Christians, and Boswell makes a subtle and original portrait out of their fusion of religious certitude and thoughtful tolerance.

Dulcie is the most vivid. She is smart and has a biting wit and a scary anger. Boswell teeters her on the edge between adolescent wildness and mental breakdown.

Her raging passage from California to Iowa is an automobile ride through Hell. At one point, when Angela absently passes a promised rest stop, Dulcie urinates in the car. Later, she flashes for a passing truck driver. On the farm, she refuses to do chores and vilely mistreats a neighbor boy who takes her out. Only after she holds Roxanne’s dying baby does a change take place. It involves choosing her life instead of sabotaging it. Her decision, an inconclusive one, is to share her father’s laborious existence. Dulcie makes a spectacular character but not quite a believable one. Boswell gives us her symptoms, her routines and her anger but something is missing. This, in fact, is pretty much true of the book as a whole.

The characters and their relationships are a collection of parts, some well-wrought, others more cursory. They are only partly assembled. The amiable Quin and his hot-blooded paramour could just as well be left out without changing much. So could an ex-hippie neighbor who talks corrosively and with interminable cleverness.

Stephen--stoic, decent and thoughtful--is the book’s most real figure. There is an amusing detail or two, as when he tries to prepare Swedish meat balls for Leah, and ends up with something that is essentially gravy. There is an impressive reflection or two on the contradiction between Stephen’s need for Angela and his need to stay on the land.

We see him best at work though; particularly in two extended scenes where he struggles in the freezing cold to save a pregnant cow. In “Mystery Ride,” a man with a cow is more real than a man alone. Boswell’s somber message, more distinctive than his book, is that what counts is not life but what you expend it on.