BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : Lives Not Truly of Our Own Making : INCIDENTS IN THE RUE LAUGIER by Anita Brookner; Random House; $23, 235 pages

“I have reached the age,” writes our “unreliable” narrator, “when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person whom she least plans to resemble: her mother.”

There can’t be a woman older than 30 who does not start at the familiarity of this simple, terrifying sentence. And I would also bet there is at least a novella in it for each of us. But how remarkably different each story would be!

Certainly, at its best, fiction takes the bones of these stories, like the two chains of nucleotides that make up DNA, and rearranges them into a coarse and complicated double helix of a tale.

Like the double helix, the story that Anita Brookner tells here spins brutally, inexorably through several generations. It plods along infuriatingly, like fate, reminding creative writers and readers and rebellious adults that there is only so much you can do to avoid life’s patterns.

Unfortunately reminiscent of “The Bridges of Madison County” (and so many novels, plays and stories long before it), “Incidents in the Rue Laugier” begins with a daughter, here in our time, finding and reading the long-hidden journal of her deceased mother’s life.

Her mother, Maud Gonthier, has forever been a mystery to her; aloof, “elegant” (that icy word), proud and full of regret. The source of regret has, of course, been love, and while the child growing up in Dijon, France, with her parents senses distance and tension, the symptoms of the disease are little more than too much decorum, her mother’s periodic sighs and her father’s hungry, “wolfish” smile.

These are the clues, as well as the building blocks, of our narrator’s own repressed romantic nature.

The journal, written in a cryptic shorthand, contains fragments of a life that the narrator does not recognize as her mother’s.

Maud, the deep, distant and disappointed daughter of a deep, distant and disappointed woman, falls in love with a shark. You know the type. A handsome, vibrant, shall we say, lout. The kind of man only a mother full of romantic regret would wish, vicariously, on her daughter. The kind of man “who does not care to explain himself. . . . Integrity for him lay in a refusal to clarify his intentions.”

It is a brief affair, in the French countryside and in Paris. A romp, through which Tyler (man of the hour) drags his earnest, responsible, yearning friend Edward as well.

Edward is, of course, left to pick up the very lovely, if damaged, pieces of Maud (with child) when Tyler moves on. He does this gallantly, regretfully and, unfortunately, hopefully. But Maud, who accepts his kind offer of marriage, has retreated forever from the world of intimacy, a world she was not trained to enter anyway, a world that glimmered on her horizon like the brilliant star of Venus, drew closer for a moment, then exploded.

As for Edward, “He felt an access of grief that all his proposed adventures had reduced themselves to this brief interlude,” and he too retreats into a life of disappointment.

One of the many great strengths of the novel is the way its characters settle in their places on the continuum between will and fate, motivated by constellations way beyond them.

It is frustrating as well, of course, and the pace of their lives, once they settle in, she with her decorum, he with his disappointment, drags to a low hum. The music in the background of this novel is Mozart; on the surface something light to dance to, restrained, with upright carriage; underneath, the endless, stultifying chasm of a life built on decisions we never should have made.

There is not much fiction out there these days, which is a shame, because when it is fine, the lessons it pins on its readers, like mute voodoo dolls, can be a thousand times more brilliant and life-threatening than the murder and mayhem of daily existence.