BOOK REVIEW : When People Don’t Follow Inner Voices : PLACES TO STAY THE NIGHT by Ann Hood ; Doubleday $19.95; 288 pages

Libby Holliday lives in Holly, Mass., but she wants to go to Hollywood. (Read that sentence again as a gloss on how hard it is to get away from some things; how every place is and even sounds somehow essentially the same.) Libby is 36, but she’s still beautiful. She’s married to handsome, kindhearted Tom Harper, who runs a garage in Holly and is a pillar of the community. They have two teen-age kids--Dana, a pretty girl who also longs to get away and will soon go to the dogs, and Troy, who has been labeled a lost cause. He does a lot of drugs and covers himself with tattoos.

Since her own teens, Libby has itched to get out, and if poor Tom has a fault, it’s that he loves his life and his wife and his town so much, he doesn’t even notice. When Libby splits without notice, Tom feels as if he’s been poleaxed. Dana, cynical, heartbroken and abandoned, methodically begins having sex with every boy at the local college. Troy gets sadder and sadder and gets more tattoos.

Meanwhile, down in New York City, Renata Handy--who also hails from Holly, Mass., and, by coincidence, was in the same high school class as Libby and Tom--has given up on the dream of being an artist that took her to New York. She works as a waitress, is a single mother and dotes on her 8-year-old daughter, Millie, who is a total charmer and has the best lines in the book.

As bad luck would have it, Millie soon turns up with a brain tumor. After a hard round of enervating treatments, Renata, at the end of her emotional rope, decides to go back to Holly, Mass., where Millie will have the benefit of country air and community support.

(Novels like this, if I read correctly, are written the way one weaves a rug, to make a pattern, to prove a point, rather than give the characters free rein to go where they want to and live in a real context. Renata finds nobody in Holly except her high school class. No father, no mother, no brother, no sister, no uncle, aunt, cousin, nobody except that high school clique who made fun of her then.)

Millie looks at the village of Holly and doesn’t much like the place. Renata relearns, painfully, that she’s big-boned and heavy and funny-looking, and--still working out of that high school context--her thirtysomething peers still mercilessly laugh at her.

This is a novel about waiting. If life is an ocean, full of swells and troughs, this is life in the trough.

Tom is waiting for his wife to come back, although that prospect appears increasingly remote. Dana the daughter is waiting until she graduates from high school so that she can escape to New York. (Although she scorns her mother, Dana’s a chip off the old block.)

Troy, like a prince in a fairy tale, looks for the right girl to redeem him: The first one is too crazy, the second one is too straight, the third one is just right. Renata waits, helplessly, for her daughter’s body to decide whether it’s going to die or not. Of course, young Millie is waiting too. The author suggests, delicately, that much of life is just that--waiting around and making (or not making) every moment count.

The weak sections here occur in Hollywood, partly because Libby has been presented as such a domestic sociopath--a woman who would leave her husband and children without a hint, a note or one word of warning. Her “movie star” fantasies are pathetic. Neither she (nor the author) seems to have a clue about what such a life might mean.

Her emotional life is nil. What is the author’s novelistic point? That beauty is only skin deep? That if you don’t get to do what you really want to do at a young age, you turn from a human into a humanoid? Or is it simply that the author didn’t familiarize herself with her West Coast locations?

Libby, once in “Hollywood,” works at a Vons. Libby doesn’t seem to live anywhere. Her existence in Los Angeles is simply not fleshed out. She tries out for a floor wax commercial (one that will run repeatedly on network TV) and gets the job by having sex just before her audition in one little room with one loathsome man in bad underwear. This is an East Coast fantasy, of course.

Out here we know that commercial auditions are considerably more crowded. Where are all the helpful young ladies taking Polaroids of every other auditioner, the flocks of folks from the ad agency, etc.? They’re probably off living in a parallel universe with Renata’s aunts and uncles and cousins--all those characters and situations the author doesn’t want to have to deal with, that come under the troublesome heading reality .

Of course, Renata and Tom end up living together. A makeshift family is formed. Renata doesn’t shed her past, but at least she redefines it. Each character in this novel finds his or her satisfactory destiny. The pattern is finished up and closed.

“Places to Stay the Night” is an interesting study on how our beginnings are apt, irrevocably, to shape the rest of all our lives and how, if we don’t pursue our correct “calling,” we rot. The novelist is obviously listening to her own inner voice. If the rest of us can’t hear it--especially out here in the West, the land of dirty old men and casting couches--it may be our problem, not hers. Then again it may be her problem, not ours.