BOOK REVIEW : The Parable of the Paper-Thin Marriage : THE PAPER ANNIVERSARY <i> by Joan Wickersham</i> ; Viking $21, 356 pages

The paper anniversary is the first, and Jack and Maisie’s marriage has already begun to shred.

The problem is the family potato factory Jack has just inherited in a small and depressed Maine town. When they met and married, Jack was a Ph.D. candidate in German literature and Maisie was working as a secretary in the Fogg Museum until she could decide upon her ultimate career.

They were living the archetypal Cambridge student life until Jack’s father died and Jack was obliged to desert the nuances of Goethe for the intricacies of crinkle-cuts, though he assured his bride that the move Down East would be only temporary.

After a few desolate months in a drafty cottage on the Maine coast, Maisie decides to depart for New York and an entry-level job in publishing. Jack agrees; the sight of his vivacious Maisie shivering under an afghan, watching TV reruns while he waits for a buyer to take the factory off his hands, distresses him. Potatoes hadn’t figured in their courtship.

The plan is to commute for a few months while Jack concentrates on sorting out his failing legacy. Once that’s done, they’ll reunite in some congenial academic metropolis and begin their real lives.

They assure each other that the arrangement is merely a stop-gap, and Maisie moves into the Brooklyn apartment of a married school friend. She promises to spend alternate weekends in Maine, while Jack cheerfully agrees to take the train to New York. Welcome to the ‘90s and the era of commuter marriage.

The first weekend gets off to a dim start. Reluctant to take Jack back to the Brooklyn apartment where they’ll immediately be involved with Caterina, Ed and their baby, Maisie and Jack wander the streets of New York like a couple of impoverished visitors.

Once they’re alone in the flat, baby-sitting for their hosts, their relationship seems more strained than before. Everything will improve, Maisie says, when she can afford an apartment of her own. “But that’s so definite,” Jack answers, aware for the first time that this “temporary” arrangement amounts to a separation.

Joan Wickersham has turned this prosaic situation into an astute contemporary parable, generating a surprising amount of empathy for her characters--stolid, dutiful Jack and restless, self-involved Maisie. They are both more complex than they seem: emblematic of their generation but just idiosyncratic enough to be atypical.

Although they remain at the center of the novel, we’re offered telling insights into the apparently enviable traditional marriage of Caterina and Ed. The potato factory looms in the background, an off-beat but ideal setting for an exploration of the conflict between obligation and self-interest. The factory is virtually the only going concern in Jack’s hometown, and he feels a genuine responsibility to its workers.

To revive the factory’s declining image, Jack engages a brisk and winsome public relations woman, who revitalizes not only the business but, inevitably, her lonesome employer.

When Maisie discovers that Jack has “met someone,” she asks plaintively: “What do you get from her that you don’t get from me?” Comfort, he wants to shout at her, comfort; but the reply he makes is far more pointed and original. “The freedom to be dull,” he says--which of course never figures in romantic dreams.

Unmoored from her job and her husband, Maisie returns to her mother’s house in Virginia, where she has a most unlikely affair. All pretense at marriage abandoned, Jack and Maisie embark on individual lives, his far more promising than hers.

Although this appealing first novel ends with a predictable resolution, the journey has taken us through stretches of under-explored territory and down some surprising byways.

By the end of “The Paper Anniversary,” readers may be glad they got safely out of their 20s before the ‘90s.