Straight Scotch

HOUSEHOLD GHOSTS (187 pp.)-- James Kennaway--Atheneum ($4).

The wife is imaginative and beautiful. The husband is decent though somewhat priggish and admits that "sex was never my strong subject." The other man is a brilliant scientist who is also a cad and a workmanlike seducer. These characters might result in a story as obvious and predictable as any triangle, but with a special kind of emotional geometry, Scottish Author James Kennaway has arrived at a taut, arresting and convincing novel.

Lovely Mary, the wife, is, as her brother Pink observes, "the most vulnerable thing on two legs." Since her husband has in effect withdrawn from her, she and Brother Pink live in a private world, have a private vocabulary and are as sensitive to each other's moods as twin fawns.

Along comes David--cynical, selfish, divorced and avidly on the lookout "for a special sort of experience; a kind of imagination of the flesh." Mary runs off with him, although she senses that she is leaving for a "gas chamber." Emotionally speaking, she is right, for David compulsively attempts to destroy her. Trying to understand himself, he inwardly sizes up his kind: "We are the tinkers, who move on; who invite experience but flee from consequences . . . We are the most dangerous of all: the permanently immature."

Household Ghosts probes delicately the many ways in which people can hurt each other and themselves. Its confrontations are as jarringly dramatic as an overheard quarrel, and its set pieces, especially a party at a small-town schoolhouse, are fine mixtures of humor and sadness.

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