Chaos, Convincingly : LONG WAY FROM HOME, <i> By Frederick Busch (Ticknor & Fields: $21.95; 292 pp.)</i>

The opening of Frederick Busch’s new novel is like an abandon-ship alarm in the small hours of the morning. In our cloudy awakening, it is a siren too insistent to be imagined; at the same time there is the dream-like chaos of feet pattering in different directions, a continual unintelligible snarling over the ship’s loudspeaker and the unmistakable fact that the deck lists.

The Mastricola family had somehow chugged along despite failing engines, sprung plates and erratic steering. Busch starts off with the day all these things give way at once. He does it in the register he commands so well: his ability to express the violence, anguish, humor and complexity of a climactic moment; to strike simultaneous dissonances in a way that heightens clarity instead of blurring it.

We get, in the first few dozen pages, a succession of cameos. Lizzie Mastricola, the principal of an Upstate New York school, is off her confident stride out of worry about her married daughter, Sarah. Willis, Lizzie’s husband and editor of the town newspaper, is hiding both his anguish at growing old and the hemorrhaging produced by his incessant smoking.

Sarah, a decorator who lives in Pennsylvania with her architect-husband, Barrett, is in breakdown mode. She walks out of the shower leaving it running and the soap unrinsed. She wakes her 6-year-old son, Steven, to announce “a little emergency feeling in the air” and proposes a picnic, even though it’s been snowing. Barrett, successively bewildered and frightened, asks what’s wrong. She answers with a list: The IRA has bombed Harrods, a baby has been abandoned in a garbage can, a friend has had a face-lift. “Because,” she adds incoherently, “it isn’t such a BAD marriage. . . . And Steven’s so SWEET and everything. I mean, we LOVE each other, after all, don’t we?” By this time Barrett is weeping in fear.

Before this, we have read what happens a day or two later: “So there came Barrett, from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, steaming over Route 81 at night to bear his son to his in-laws and tell them that their daughter was gone.” In the car, Barrett’s child consoles him , telling him that he’ll find her, that they’ll be back soon and that he, Steven, will be just fine with his grandparents. Barrett--only gradually do we see that he is as close to breakdown as Sarah--has decided that his fugitive wife has gone to Santa Fe, which they once visited. He won’t call the police or wait for a message; clueless, he will get in his car and drive 2,000 miles to look for her. In fact, he is running away too.

There are other cameos, also in scrambled simultaneity. We see Lizzie and Willis, in shock in their kitchen after Steven has been left with them and Barrett has steamed West. Willis feels even older; his hopes for a few peaceful years seem gone. Lizzie, who shares with him the closeness and distance of an old and loving marriage, eschews her husband’s complicated self-pity for a simpler rage at her daughter. Her adopted daughter, that is; because in rural Pennsylvania, near the New York border, we see Gloria, a stumpy, self-willed county nurse and herbalist, placing ads in small-town papers: “Am I your mother?”

With extraordinary compression, subtle detailing and a stunning use of montage, Busch has given us a sense of an entire American drama. It is a disaster more than a tragedy, the sort of disaster that can happen to good (mostly) people adrift in contemporary life, with little help from society or from any faith apart from an uncertain balance between self-fulfillment and meaning well.

In the first 30 or so pages, we have virtually a whole novel at short-story length. The effect is exhilarating. We have inklings of Barrett’s moral disintegration--he will come to a squalid as well as violent end--and of Gloria’s half-mad efforts, after 30 years, to claim her daughter and grandson. We sense the strengths and vulnerabilities of Lizzie and Willis, and the pain and dignity of Steven, the abandoned child.

Unfortunately, after this beginning, “Long Way From Home” turns into a short story at novel length. Busch, the most open-spirited of writers and an extraordinarily talented one, tells us in a prefatory note that his novel began as a short piece, which he expanded on the advice of his fellow novelist Richard Bausch. It was not good advice, though Busch quite rightly takes the responsibility.

There are some splendid moments that follow the opening. Willis’s intelligent care of the bereaved Steven slows his own too easy surrender to old age. Lizzie’s take-charge instincts undergo an enriching transformation as she comes to realize what she can and cannot do as a grandmother. In an anguish of fear she watches the boy swing dangerously on a rope over the river that runs near their house, and realizes what it expresses: “He’s simply taking the shortest path, and the riskiest, into his mother’s life.”

But the playing out of Sarah’s and Barrett’s separate flights, and much of the rest of the book’s development, are less successful. There is a sense of padding, for one thing. A brief side-plot about a boy in Lizzie’s school who causes a scandal by failing to salute the flag is both cursory and obtrusive. Sarah’s early, passionate affair with a painter fails to show anything very interesting about him or her; an extended sex scene between them follows right upon a similar scene between her and Barrett. The two scenes are all too similar, in fact.

Sarah and Barrett are self-indulgent and curtailed children of the ‘70s and they don’t amount to a great deal more than that. “Troubled” is their adjective; neither really has a character available for being modified by it. Sarah does manage to heal, after her encounter with Gloria jars her into accepting her life, her child and her adoptive identity.

Busch is the prolific author of the powerful though partly flawed “Harry and Catherine” and “Closing Arguments,” and of a memorable and quite unflawed collection of short stories, “Absent Friends.” He is a restless and valuable figure and certainly under-appreciated. His brilliance and originality show themselves best in the illuminating individual scene; he seems less comfortable with the long connective work of developing and rounding out plot and character. There, sometimes, he will drop in a glib, even a sentimental, formula; naming the emotional transaction instead of showing it.

His strengths and weaknesses, and the risks he takes, are all evident in “Long Way From Home,” with the soft spots more apparent than in his other recent work. Still, the extraordinary beginning and a number of moments throughout show what he is capable of doing and what I believe he will continue to do.