Life Is Elsewhere : THE FAMILY MARKOWITZ.<i> By Allegra Goodman</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 262 pp., $22</i>

Allegra Goodman published her first collection of stories, “Total Immersion,” at the age of 21. Goodman grew up in Hawaii, and many of the stories, set amid a fractured Jewish community juggling temple politics, real estate deals and orthodoxy, are dazzling. Even the extraordinary glossary, appended to define the text’s Hebrew, Yiddish and Hawaiian words, is good reading.

The first story in that collection, “Oral History”--a story not set in Hawaii--was written while Goodman was still in high school. Eight years later it reappears in her new book, “The Family Markowitz,” not quite a novel but a cycle of stories spanning almost 10 years in the life of three generations of the Markowitz family. (Nine of the 10 were previously published in either Commentary or the New Yorker.)

The stories focus on large moments and small: two weddings, a Seder, a Friday night dinner, health problems, an academic conference, an appearance on talk radio and assorted synagogue visits. Beneath the talkings--past each other, the continual misunderstandings strewn across continents and oceans--there are no major tragedies or dramas, no verbal pyrotechnics and only a hint of off-page sex. The writing is so deft and affectionate, the skewed perceptions so familiar, the dialogue rings so painfully true and is so funny that the stories often feel lighter than they are. More surprising, Goodman, now 29, looks longest and hardest at the older family members. The college-aged children, although etched clearly, remain at the edge of her canvas.

The book opens with the death of Rose Markowitz’s easygoing second husband, Maury Rosenberg, in New York City. Now the twice-widowed Rose and her two sons are forced to re-create a variation of their original nuclear family. None of them is particularly ready for the shift. Goodman’s acute eye and even sharper ear reveal layers of tensions, loneliness and wariness as these self-absorbed brothers must deal with their mother and each other as they move deeper into middle and old age.

Ed, husband of Sarah and father of four, is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Georgetown University. Since the bombing of the World Trade Center, he has blossomed into an expert on international terrorism, with an acute understanding of “the Other,” but doesn’t have much time for Rose.

Henry, the dutiful, unmarried son, living in a good climate, brings his mother to Venice, Calif., where he works in a seaside art gallery while working his way through therapists and his sexual identity. (Henry’s sexual ambiguity is one of the few hints we have of any life of the flesh in this driven clan.)

But after a few years, Henry leaves Rose--alone and bewildered--in her senior citizen residence, while he heads first for New Jersey, then Oxford, England, where he manages a Laura Ashley store and almost lives the life of a gentleman scholar.

Meanwhile, every Monday afternoon, Alma Renquist, a graduate student, interviews Rose for her thesis on the old women of Venice. Alma, longing for the exactitude of social science as opposed to the vagaries of literature (and life), is driven wild by Rose’s digressions and confusions. She repeatedly tries to pin Rose down. “So you were really part of the Jewish intellectual elite. Is that a good description of the family?” she asks.

“ ‘I had six brothers,’ Rose says thoughtfully. ‘Some were smart, some weren’t. Joseph, yes. Joel, yes.’ She ticks them off on her fingers. ‘Saul, no. Mentel, yes. Nachum--died too young. Chaim, smart? Definitely not--may he rest in peace. He had a heart of gold. Maybe half the family was elite, the rest, not.’ ”

Understanding between Rose and her children is no better. Ed, the student of “the Other,” can barely comprehend his mother or his brother. He is equally mystified by his four children, who arrive home from college for Seders and weddings, the boys long-legged and hungry, the girls refusing to eat most of the family food (Miriam, the medical student, is very strictly kosher, while Yehudit, the youngest, is a vegetarian.)

In this world, centered on family rituals and rites of passage, the return of Rose, who has collapsed once too often in California, is too unsettling for Ed to contemplate. In an unusual moment of closeness, he tells his brother: “ ‘All I want is for things to be normal. Where the kids are kids and Ma would be an adult, and the generations would be sort of in order. Henry will you stop touching me!’ He shakes off Henry’s hand. ‘I hate it when you do that. The thing is, if Ma moves in with us I’ll have a nervous breakdown. I know it makes her happy, living in that pink room, but it’s too weird for me. I just can’t take it if I’m supposed to be her father.’ ”

Goodman is brilliant at capturing the clutter of both interior and exterior life--her characters often say one thing while their minds are elsewhere. She depicts these moments so perfectly that it’s easy to share Rose’s thoughts as, on the eve of her granddaughter’s wedding, she listens to her counterpart, Ilse, the groom’s grandmother:

“The story is not so different from that of Rose’s family, and that makes Rose feel odd. She can’t help feeling that this is her tale to tell, or that at least she should be telling hers first. She has come to believe in the singularity of her own experience as a refugee in England during World War I and an immigrant in America. In her mind’s eye, with her background as a reader of historical romances, she can’t help believing that if there is a greater trend or larger story to be told, then it would have to be her story writ large. It isn’t polite the way Ilse is talking; it’s nearly plagiarism.”

Goodman isn’t plagiarizing anyone--these stories sound like no one else’s--as she sharply appraises the shifts and quandaries of one variety of American Jewish life.