BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Why We Live Where We Live and Why That Even Matters : TO MAKE A HOUSE A HOME <i> by Jane Davison and Lesley Davison</i> ; Random House $27.50, 320 pages

I love this book, which is not to say that it’s perfect--only that it’s perfectly wonderful, for all its imperfections, just like a cozy family homestead.

Author Jane Davison published an earlier edition of this book as “The Fall of a Doll’s House” in 1980, and her daughter, Leslie, has updated it for this republication with a single, final chapter about how her generation regards the family domicile differently than her mother, and her mother’s mother, did.

The important part of the text is what the late Jane Davison wrote--about why we live where we live, and how women’s lives are tied up in that place, whatever it is. The downside of the relationship--the aspect of it that’s gotten all the loud press for the past 20 years--is that women have been considered wholly responsible for the home, often to the exclusion of anything else they might want to do.

But well-publicized domestic oppression has an interesting, under-explored flip side: Some women who give themselves over to their homes develop an intimate, idiosyncratic appreciation of their environment. Some fall in love, not because society told them to, but because they couldn’t help themselves. Men, by comparison, seem like transients, and worse off for it.

Davison’s various homes are like people--demanding, undependable, sometimes overbearing. She broke off love affairs because one too many things went wrong, or because suddenly she felt like she needed a change.

And she was always curious, always looking at people and their habitats: She once got on a bus from Boston to Los Angeles “full of faith that a brief but panoramic trip away from home would provide “insights” and above all “perspective,” that wonderful all-purpose commodity.

When she ran errands she drove home not by the most efficient route but along surface streets, so she could see people, at dusk, when house lights were on, inhabiting their spaces. She was fascinated by the way we all fit on the domestic stage.

It’s Davison’s quirky passion that makes the book so irresistible (at least to those of us, like the author, who have always dreamed of someday building a house).

She understands that women have strained to free themselves from compulsory housework since time immemorial; in her opening chapter she considers Nora, who walked out on house and family in Ibsen’s play, “A Doll’s House,” and discusses her own decision to move her family out of a house, as though the structure would suffocate them.

But she also knows--deeply, emotionally, illogically--how a woman can be in thrall to her house, how her emotional life manifests itself in blue trim for the French doors or a Pegboard in the kids’ room.

And one fond nod to her writing style: Reading Jane Davison is like having an endless cup of coffee with your most articulate, sarcastic, cunning friend.

Her prose seems to me the literary equivalent of a vast, florid paisley shawl--colorful yet disciplined, emotional but precise, mindful of the restrictions of the form but never a slave to them. Yes, she goes on too long, and yes, she gets off track for so long that the detour becomes the main drag, but I didn’t much care.

Her daughter Lesley is perhaps more cautious than her mother was. She made her first renter’s mistake early on, renovating an apartment with such verve that the landlord upped the rent and forced her and her roommate to find another place. Since then she has moved often, refusing to make a commitment to a home lest her heart be broken.

The one priceless contribution she makes to the text is a note her mother had written to herself six months before her death. I won’t spoil it by paraphrasing her observations on “death as a destination.” I will only say that her notion of the final scene she’d like to play is one of the most endearing bits of end game prose imaginable, a perfect fantasy for a woman to whom environment was all.

If there is a God, and if he or she has time to attend to the occasional individual exit, I only hope Jane Davison got what she wanted. Her book will make you think long, hard, and with humor about where you are and whether you’re happy.