NONFICTION - Dec. 11, 1994

SNOW ANGELS by Stewart O’Nan. (Doubleday: $20; 305 pp.) With its simple prose, bleak subject matter, and icy landscapes, Steward O’Nan’s first novel, “Snow Angels,” shines with a cold, stark light. Set in 1974 in a small Pennsylvania town, “Snow Angels” is actually two stories--the breakup of 15-year-old Arthur Parkinson’s family, and the murder of a young woman.

Annie is a single mother with a short temper. Her pathetic ex-husband, Glen, desperately wants to reconcile, but Annie is too busy having an affair with a co-worker’s boyfriend. The events leading up to her murder--told in third person with a slightly mythic tone--stands in sharp contrast to Arthur who narrates his own story. Here is Arthur in the middle of band practice at the moment Annie is killed. “‘We have all worked very hard this year,” he (the band teacher) said, and paused, breathing steam . . . and then we heard what I immediately identified (from my own .22, my father’s Mossberg, the nightly news from Vietnam) as gunshots. A clump of them. They crackled like fireworks, echoed over the bare trees on the other side of the highway. They were close. The band turned to them in unison, something Mr. Chervenick could never get us to do.”

The one serious flaw in “Snow Angels” is Annie’s character. When a horrible tragedy happens that is partly her own fault, O’Nan seems to freeze, unable to give us any inner life. This is unfortunate since, even though Arthur dominates the story, “Snow Angels” is, on some basic level, Annie’s book. Still, this novel has a strangely beautiful, desolate appeal.