Small Lives Under Siege : DOLLY, <i> By Anita Brookner (Random House: $22; 256 pp.)</i>

Compared to the action-packed, plot-driven competition, Anita Brookner’s novels are pokey sleepers. They don’t hinge on big events. Their characters aren’t terribly heroic. Their stories are largely vehicles for an examination of human longing and connection. But Brookner’s portraits of small lives under siege have a way of lingering in your mind long after the plot-twisters are history.

This is certainly true of “Dolly,” her latest novel, which unfolds in the leisurely tone of a reminiscence--one family member musing about another: “I thought of her as the aunt rather than as my aunt,” recalls the narrator, Jane Manning, “for anything more intimate would have implied appropriation, or attachment. Attachment came later, in a form that was wistful, almost painful.”

Dolly blows onto the Manning family stage with all the power of a hurricane. She’s not a person so much as an electric charge, and her young niece wisely decides to get out of her way. The alternative, which Jane’s eager mother Etty chooses, is to cater to Dolly--and be flattened.

“You live in the middle of nowhere,” Dolly complains during a teatime visit to the Mannings with her husband, Etty’s brother. She fidgets and checks her watch, refusing to taste the delicacies served in her honor.

It is then that Jane, noting her aunt’s stylish, scented fur, “carnivorous” teeth and impatience to leave for somewhere more exciting, feels her “first misgivings about the impermeability” of her parents’ world. In Dolly’s view, only those as passionate and pleasure-hungry as herself are worth knowing, and the stodgy Mannings don’t cut it.

After that, she never lingers with them long (though they are handy for cadging money), but the book’s pervaded by her presence. Volatile, unbearable, charming, she is the focus of Jane’s narrative, the vehicle for the larger study of a family’s history. World conflict, poverty, restless, unhappy women, deserting husbands, pampered siblings: the Mannings’ destinies were forged by these in varying combinations.

Jane, whose parents’ domestic peace bloomed in response to their contentious childhoods, grows up amid sweetness, contentment and respect. Dolly, whom war and want robbed of opportunity and affection, hungers for power, position and love, none of which she ever hangs onto long.

The lives of Dolly and Jane dramatize one of the novel’s central questions: Which is more desirable, a stable, albeit timid existence rooted in the predictable, or a life of longing and potential passion?

Brookner--whose earlier novel “Hotel du Lac” won Britain’s coveted Booker Prize--has visited this territory before. What makes “Dolly” so absorbing is its evolutionary quality, the march of years that deepens Jane’s understanding and gives her life dimension while reducing Dolly to childlike dependence.

When they meet, Dolly’s at the top of her form, or just past it, and Jane, the unformed child, is very much in awe of her. As time passes, Jane develops- -acquiring money, a career, a life--while Dolly’s powers diminish.

Having spent her youth pursuing male attention, she can’t sustain it as she ages. Her last affair ends badly. When her boyfriend, the sly, rather coarse owner of a limo service, dumps her, her spark dies. She loses the “rapturous pleading for pleasure, which so appealed to men” and becomes just another gray-haired English woman in flat shoes and a cloth coat, her face pale with resignation.

For Jane, Dolly’s transformation embodies the fate of a generation of women who depended on men for their sense of self. Still, it isn’t feminism or female solidarity that finally forges a kinship between the two. They are, after all, the only family either has--the survivors, Dolly and the woman she at last deigns to call “my niece.”

Among the pleasures of Brookner’s novels is their ability to reel you in, not in anticipation of the next event but with the allure of living characters. Even peripheral people are accorded her minute attention. Hugo, Dolly’s somewhat dissolute but dashing husband, is described as “adept at putting a woman at her ease with the sort of flattering badinage which means very little... If he had lived,” Jane reports, “I would have pictured him at the bridge table, a cigarette smouldering in a glass ashtray at his left hand, his eyes watering with the smoke...the amiable smile still on his lips.”

Her own father, by contrast, she characterizes as slim and taciturn, a man of real courtesy and calm whose face “softened when he looked at my mother.”

The Mannings’ relationship, in fact, is one of the delights of “Dolly,” as is the child’s-eye view of grown-up life that comes to us via Jane.

As a narrator, Jane’s a mixed blessing. Keen and quick in her observations of others, she’s a lot slower with herself, as when she fails to explain her passive, silent suffering at Dolly’s hands after her parents die. At times her reticence about her own feelings makes her appear terminally wan, almost characterless. She prompts the desire familiar to the veteran Brookner reader to throttle her until her eyes pop while screaming, “Do something! Defend yourself!”

For the most part, though, “Dolly” is an interesting, compelling read that takes us deep into the territory of the heart, with all its rocky roads and shimmering possibilities.