Special Deliveries : MY YEAR WITH THE STORK CLUB, <i> By Maureen Freely (Alfred A. Knopf: $23; 305 pp.)</i>

Any cynic or skeptic who reproduced for the first time after the age of 30 will find the concept behind this book--if not the wicked execution of the idea--irresistible. Author Maureen Freely, along with plenty of psychologists, believes that the arrival of children can drive a spike through an already rotting marriage. More to the point, she believes that the crazed efforts we make to raise those offspring in some politically correct and culturally enlightened fashion can drive us to the brink. But unlike the sober-sided doomsayers who people the talk shows, Freely wants to have a good laugh at the decline and fall of the nuclear family. In fact, she thinks it’s one long hoot from beginning to frenzied end.

Mike and Laura embody many of the cliches people like to spout about San Franciscans: they seem congenitally predisposed to making too little money; they both believe they’d be happier doing something else (they suffer from the waiter’s “I’m really an actor” syndrome). They take their problems, and the search for acceptable solutions, way too seriously.

They might have drifted into their curmudgeonly dotage without incident, had they not decided to have a family, a boy and a girl, whose arrival galvanizes their anxieties. Laura turns for support to what her husband comes to call the “stork club,” three other women on a similar crusade to raise the perfect children, perfectly. Michael, whose self-absorption strains the patience of everyone around him (including, finally, the reader), elects himself the final arbiter on all issues relating to child-rearing, and, for that matter, marital bliss. His descent from mild insufferableness into raving misogynistic madness, from dad-knows-best into the insufferable, libidinous smugness of a born-again primary care-giver, is meant to be the funniest psychological joy ride since Jack Nicholson’s character took the wife and kid to a deserted inn for a quiet winter retreat in “The Shining.”

So there are two questions: Does it ring true, and is it funny?

The easier query first, and I speak with some authority, as the mother of a preschooler whose current tally of activities includes preschool, music and dance, and may expand to embrace gym and/or swimming by month’s end. Freely’s swipe at modern parents is viciously accurate, if a bit too manic to sustain itself. Anyone who has ever read the ingredient labels on mainstream peanut butter or children’s cereals will convulse at the families’ preoccupation with feeding their kids the right stuff. Anyone who has ever quaked in their boots over whether the little toddler, or toddlerette, will get into a good school will recognize the icy fingers that slide down Mike’s spine when he botches his children’s first day of higher education.

And she has managed to nail three out of four varieties of dysfunctional couples: they squirm uncomfortably from one chapter to the next, doomed frogs, while Freely lays out the dissecting trays and straight pins. Ophelia and Kiki are odd and interesting enough to warrant a sequel. She’s a rich exiled Cuban and he’s a poor boy who escaped El Paso; both of them are doctors and the parents of a boy who does not easily make friends with food. She seems to resent her lowered station in life, while he, having decided that she is beyond satisfying, is the Walter Mitty of sexual fantasy. The friction between them is almost palpable, and archly funny.

Charlotte and Trey are a different kind of mismatch: a professor who suspects sexual discrimination behind every professional and personal disappointment, and a distracted loafer whose smoke-screen about setting up an accounting business at home works fine until his wife discovers that he’s been slaving all night over a game of Donkey Kong.

Becky brings a trust fund to her marriage, which her investment-crazed husband Mitchell does his best to squander on some questionable real estate deals.

In each case the woman is stronger, or has at least found better outlets for her neuroses than her husband. The problem is that the couple at the center of the story is not nearly so well delineated, in part because Mike, as the narrator, is obsessed with his own thoughts and actions, to the diminishment of his wife’s. We know that he is that most dreadful of creatures, a man who dresses up all his bad behaviors in 100-proof righteous indignation. He gets drunk and misbehaves at a dinner because Laura’s friends are getting in the way of his genuinely amorous feelings for his beleaguered wife; he gets drunk and runs into a tree with the kids in the car because life is driving him crazy; he starts affairs with Laura’s three friends because he’s redefined himself as the househusband and sex is some kind of perverse extension of the affection he feels for his gal pals.

What starts out to be funny--Mike’s rant on all the right things he did during Laura’s labor had my seat-mate on the airplane wishing she was next to a sleeper--finally becomes exhausting. Freely manages to control an octet’s worth of increasingly wild behavior, but there is such a thing as too much fun. When Mitchell faces an IRS investigation he instructs Becky to rearrange their furniture, so that it will accurately reflect the home-office deduction he’s taken. Putting the desk in the living room, and shifting everything else accordingly, is very funny once. By the third go-round, it is routinized humor, and I felt relieved to escape into the next scene. When Mike manages finally to fracture his marriage by leaving Laura and the children stranded at an airline gate, their passports in his pocket as he boards a plane for Greece, it’s hard not to scream “good riddance!” and hope he has an as yet undiscovered allergy to lamb or yogurt.

We are a ridiculous bunch, we eager parents; that is not for one second the issue. Dance class recitals look like presidential press conferences, with all those cameras and mini-cams. Market shelves are full of organic versions of the Cheetos and potato chips we inhaled--and would never allow our little darlings to consume. But Freely’s novel frustrates, in the end, perhaps because it is such a cold wail. I like to think, sometimes, that harried parents celebrate their children because it is such a glorious relief--and release--to be with small people who do not know how to stifle, to censor, to hold back, who are capable of jumping up and down and yelling “yippee” just because someone they love has walked in the door. Some of our excesses are oppressive, surely, but just as surely, some are the overflow of delight. The children barely exist in “My Year With the Stork Club,” save as cameo appearances, and that may be the key: The book tips so far to one side, there is so little heart to balance it.