BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : What’s Happened to the Salt of the Earth? : SNOW ANGELS <i> by Stewart O’Nan</i> ; Doubleday $25, 320 pages

Every college generation deserves a “Catcher in the Rye” or “A Separate Peace” of its own, and this fine first novel seems a strong contender for the ‘90s. In Stewart O’Nan’s “Snow Angels,” 14-year-old Arthur Parkinson tells two distinct stories, never forcing the connection but allowing the lives of the Marchand family and the Parkinsons to merge, separate and rejoin in the small Pennsylvania town where both lived.

The novel is set in 1974, when Arthur is a high school freshman and his parents are separated and waiting for their divorce to become final. He’s at band practice when gunshots startle the crowd of students. “What we had heard was someone being murdered, someone most of us know, if dimly.”

The victim turns out to be Annie Marchand, who had baby-sat for Arthur and his sister years before, when the Parkinson family was intact and Annie was herself an ebullient teen-ager. Arthur’s connection with her was more than merely casual. More than once as a child, he had caught himself wishing that vivacious, red-haired Annie was his mother.

Now Arthur’s sister, Astrid, is thousands of miles away with the Army in Germany; his father has moved out, and Arthur and his mother are living in a seedy apartment project, pretending not to mind their reduced circumstances--and fooling no one. Caught between his hostile parents, Arthur is smoking too much pot, ditching school and retreating into a no-man’s-land of his own.

Annie Marchand has grown up, married and had a daughter, but she and husband Glenn are no longer together. Annie is living alone with her toddler in an isolated, run-down house at the end of a cul de sac, working as a waitress at the country club and is in the midst of a pointless affair with a guy who just happens to belong to her best friend. Even though Glenn Marchand still adores her, Annie is bored with his fecklessness, tired of rushing home to a demanding child and a husband who’s spent the day on the sofa with a six-pack and the TV.

She’s vulnerable, and Brock picks up signals she hardly knows she’s given.

Arthur tells her story as he tells his own, letting the reader perceive the parallels and make the analogies. Butler, Pa., doesn’t offer much beyond a decaying downtown, a shabby strip mall, a couple of fast-food places, the steel mill and the Home for Crippled Children where Arthur’s mother works.

The best and the brightest leave town as soon as they can. Twenty years later, when Arthur and his sister go back to Butler for their annual Christmas visit to their mother, the name of the Home has been changed to the politically correct “Rehabilitation Center,” but everything else is just as it was the year that Annie Marchand was killed and Arthur’s father left home.

Seeing the town again, ritualistically driving past his old house, he tries to put the events of that pivotal season in perspective. In reliving the story of that particular winter, he finally succeeds in comprehending the pressures that led to his parents’ breakup and to the Marchands’ compound tragedy. He couldn’t make sense of these things as an adolescent, but in retrospect, everything that happened seems predestined and inevitable.

Recollected, the bits and pieces of Annie Marchand’s life create a distinct pattern of carelessness, disappointment and despair, each small and apparently insignificant incident building on the one before until the whole ramshackle structure crumbles, destroying an entire family. Told in roughly alternating chapters, the disparate elements of the novel fuse naturally, subtly but dramatically illustrating the inexorable process by which hope fades, ambition falters and love dies.

Rueful and ironic, “Snow Angels” proves the enduring vitality of realism. Once you’ve finished it, your view of flyover towns and the people who live and work there will be radically and permanently changed. You won’t soon forget the Parkinsons and the Marchands, and you’ll wonder what happened to the folks who used to be called the salt of the earth and the backbone of America. The answers aren’t easy, but they’re worth exploring.