Book Review : Novel Interweaves Present With a War-Torn Past : THE NOTEBOOK OF LOST THINGS; by Megan Staffel; Soho Press $23, 232 pages

Paris, N.Y., the setting of Megan Staffel’s new novel, is a weary, defeated town on a seriously downward trajectory. The dairy farms have all disappeared; the department store has closed; even the bus service has been terminated. This Paris, unlike its better-known namesake, is a place “where desire met futility.”

Helene, the central character, is a 41-year-old German refugee who works in the post office, talks to plants and is interested in the “beautiful and unexpected.” She shares a house with William, who sells used books and is a dwarf; far more implausibly, she shares her bed with Harry, a crude bartender who possesses little imagination and whose world is “flat and featureless.” Among Staffel’s other Parisians are Stella Doyle, a poor, gutsy teenager for whom everything is difficult; her classmate-lover Darryl, son of the town’s doctor; and Stella’s crazy mother, Hattie, a former beauty who is eating herself into oblivion.

Staffel captures the loopiness of teenage romance well. Here is Stella imagining the ultimate intimacy with Darryl: “She would be a sock on his foot! . . . If she were his T-shirt she would beg him to wear her out. . . . If she were his shoelace she would stay tied from morning till night.” Far too often, though, these characters speak in ways that are laughably stilted. “Kids today don’t have any sense of the challenge!” proclaims Stella’s teacher, Faith. “Ultimately, this book is a testament to the indefatigability of the human mind,” says William of the notebook.

But “The Notebook’s” flaws run much deeper than silly language; indeed, at the heart of this book is a baffling moral obtuseness. Staffel’s true focus (and true heroine) is Helene’s mother, Uta, who has been dead for two years when the novel opens. Uta, we are told, was strong, wise and intuitive: “She didn’t examine; she didn’t question; she simply moved.”

Uta is also, in Staffel’s paradigm, the ultimate innocent victim, a simple German woman whose life is destroyed by the “absurd” bombing of Dresden, after which she courageously emigrates to America. Yet Uta may strike some readers as less than wonderful. Here she is in Dresden on a beautiful evening in 1940, perched on a riverside with her mother as they sip tea and listen to music: “Isn’t this a splendid moment? Look at the children swimming!” Uta’s mother remarks. Such scenes are remembered by Uta--and written by Staffel--without a shred of irony, much less shame.

Staffel’s title refers to the diaries that Uta keeps during and after the war, diaries that chronicle the terrible losses she has suffered. At one point, Uta notes that the Singers, her nice Jewish neighbors, have been carted off, but this does not concern her for too long. Far more important, Uta never connects the Singers’ losses to her own in any way. Instead, she steadfastly, lovingly recalls her magical city--a city where “quartets played all day long and we would listen to music and birds and the laughter of children.” How you respond to “The Notebook of Lost Things” will depend in large part on how you feel about Uta’s mourning for the lovely world that was unaccountably, unfairly taken from her.