How Much Grief Can One Family Survive? : ERRANDS by Judith Guest; Ballantine Books $25, 335 pages

Meet the Browner family--three robust kids, decent, happily married Mom and Dad, their dog, Lucky--heading off to spend a summer on a lake. Kids argue, parents organize activities and food: It’s a vacation like any other. Except that Keith Browner, 38, is dying of brain cancer. “Too corny, too melodramatic,” he muses about his fate, and as a reader, you might agree, especially given Judith Guest’s setup in her third novel, “Errands.”

During the first 70 pages of relentless present-tense writing (“His memory is going. He knows it; so does she.”), the book is a waiting game--like being locked in a cabin, braced for thunder, on a lowering June afternoon. Meals are eaten, cards shuffled and played, but who cares? Only one fact has any meaning, and to the family’s anguish, it’s out of their control.

But suddenly, after a tense month and a half, Keith collapses from a seizure and in short order recovers, understands how far gone he is and drops dead, without time to say goodbye to Annie, his wife of 17 years. From this point on, the Browners fly apart and Guest’s book takes off, plunging into her familiar territory of grief, guilt, denial and punishment--a place where kids and parents become strangers and the future holds nothing but more tragedy.

For Guest, tragedy--along with terror--is a staple of human life, and more specifically, of middle-class life, despite its safe, sane, polite facade. In “Ordinary People,” her first novel, published in 1976, she ripped the front off a quiet Midwestern home, exposing madness, rage and torture in the wake of a beloved son’s death. A 1982 book, “Second Heaven,” featured more turmoil in suburbia, and now comes “Errands,” her most compelling case yet for staying in bed with a pillow over your head.

Of course with Keith gone, Annie has to take charge. Nearly broke and lacking work experience, she must interview for lowly jobs with haughty, dismissive people. When she’s home, her children snarl at one another; when she’s out, they get in trouble, skipping school, stealing money, loafing with other messed-up kids. Nor is there any dishy man in the wings for Annie--or for Guest as a writer--no soft-focus “Sleepless in Seattle” doings to ease the pain. Instead, Annie struggles on, develops shingles and dreams about suicide while bad luck dogs her family. A new bike? Stolen. New kitten? Run over. A lazy afternoon of fishing? Gory accident with fish hook.

Why don’t we run from such crushing (and admittedly over-the-top) misery? What makes us root for Annie and the kids--Harry, Jimmy and Julie--who spend so much time sniping at one another? The answer lies in Guest’s narrative style, which, chapter by chapter, switches point of view and mixes in letters, journal entries and first-person musings until each yearning soul is vividly evoked.

In his or her plain-spoken, ordinary way, each character is a hero--fighting fear and isolation to make life comprehensible again. Despite fantasies of fleeing, they’re steadfast, even when rewards don’t come. None of them--from Annie facing a brutal mother-in-law to Julie, battling her older brothers’ contempt--ever backs down or sinks into self-pity.

This, in Guest’s view, is our job--to do our “errands,” however absurd, to keep going and eventually, if we’re lucky, to “make peace with what is.” By the end, the Browners have turned a corner and come back a little closer to each other. They have learned some no-frills Midwestern wisdom: “You can’t always keep trouble away. That doesn’t mean you have to offer it a chair to sit on.”