IT'S A SMALL-TOWN WORLD; DOTS ON THE MAP LOOM LARGE IN THE LITERARY WORLD.

Byline: Bernadette Murphy Special to the Daily News

The small-town life, characterized by simple times, an affinity with the soil and a sense of moral backbone, has been idealized and evoked over the years. The call to reminisce about ``the way things used to be'' seems to exert a magnetic pull directly proportional to the mounting frenzy of contemporary life. Three new books - a memoir, a novel and an anthology - attempt to paint this small-town lifestyle and the people who live it, infusing energy and veracity into the down-home existence and thereby animating an unpretentious way of life that is becoming ever-more foreign to many of us.

These books bring to mind my father-in-law, a man who grew up on a family farm in Minnesota. Over the years, I've listened with fascination to his stories of that life and often thought that his personal journey - from growing up as one of 12 children milking cows and planting crops, to becoming a city-dwelling CEO of a computer firm - may be analogous to our nation's development. We've increasingly left behind that agrarian, small-town life for a faster-paced, technology-dependent lifestyle and seem to require a wistful look backward to remind us of what we've cast aside.

It is precisely this locus between what used to be and what is fast becoming that illuminates Bobbie Ann Mason's ``Clear Springs,'' a quiet and exacting memoir that vibrates with life. Beginning on the family farm in rural Kentucky, Mason's memoir traces three generations of her family, from the upbringing and courtship of her grandparents and her grandmother's struggles with mental illness, through her parents' hardscrabble farming career and her own childhood on that farm.

Mason leaves this down-home setting to go off to college, eventually completing a graduate-level education that takes her, intellectually at least, far from the fields of her childhood. She lives in the counterculture of New York City in the 1960s, becomes an award-winning writer, returns home to oversee the filming of her novel, ``In Country,'' and finally settles back in her native Kentucky.

Mason's story meanders like a well-trod country lane, with precise humor, delights around every bend and startling intelligence. After the death of her father, for instance, Mason tries to get her mother to talk of her own childhood. Orphaned at an early age and raised by extended family, her mother often told the story of receiving an orange one Christmas as her only gift, though she refuses to give much else of her history. Her mother's reticence fuels Mason's desire to know and to understand how all the parts of her history have come together in Mason's own life.

``Drawing on the theory of chaos,'' she writes, ``I imagine how the Christmas orange comes down to me. In chaos theory, the smallest incident has far-reaching consequences. The ripple effect of the exhaust fan of an air conditioner in Paducah, say, may eventually affect a storm in Padua. I like to imagine how generations of the attitudes and behaviors of country people, a legacy of paucity and small shadings of pride and resistance and shame, intertwined and radiated down through the time in increasingly complicated shapes. There is much more to my mother's story than the orange. I want to know the details. I want to color in the outline.''

In the act of coloring in these outlines, Mason translates her family's existence into a story of us all: about the search for meaning and the limitations of history, the drive to become what has never been before and the acceptance of our own archeological constraints.

Mason celebrates the singularity of every life experience when she details her kindred. ``One reason to fashion a story,'' she tells us, thinking of all the opportunities her mother never had that she has been able to enjoy, ``is to lift a grudge. I can see my mother holding the weight of her life. It is too much to sum up or dispense with or bury.''

Mason's ``Clear Springs'' uses reverence for the written word and the uniqueness of life, together with a staunch avoidance of sentimentality, to fashion a living, breathing portrait of plain country living.

The same sense of awe surrounding the individuality of each human story finds voice in the anthology of ``poetry and prose by everyday folk,'' ``American Mosaic.'' The book's editor, Robert Wolf, spent the past decade hosting writing workshops for average people, encouraging them to tell their stories orally at first and then to shape their narratives by writing them down.

In this collection, farmers in Northeast Iowa ruminate on the ancestral way of life that seems to be dying at the hands of corporate greed; the residents of the Mississippi Delta tell of life on that fertile plane; and the stories of those who make their living on the great river itself provide a flash of recognition into what Mississippi life both past and present means to these people.

Communal life as it was practiced in Amana, Iowa, is recounted. Formed in 1845 as one of many utopian and communal societies of the day, Amana went through its ``Great Change'' to secularized town in 1932. The Amana writers retell the communal living experience and how the new order has affected long-term residents and newcomers alike.

And in a section that seems to sit on its own, there's verse and prose by the homeless in Nashville, Tenn., their words giving glimpse into the realities of destitution and the angry mind-set that permeates the cycle of poverty in our larger cities.

Overall, the writing in this anthology is hit or miss. Most compelling are the ``Communal Life'' and ``River and Delta'' sections, where the stories assume a life and vigor of their own, and the voices flow freely without editorial interruption. In the other sections, the editor Wolf seems to imbue a political agenda he wishes to forward via these pieces of writing. With the problems of homelessness, for example, he blames modernism as the root of systemic disease that has created the predicament and uses the workshop participants' writing to support his point.

His didactic introductions to each section are overwrought, and his polemical editing becomes especially annoying in the section on farming. In it, he not only includes moralizing essays on the evils of nonorganic farming, which seem out of context in the mode of storytelling, but he includes his own essay on the Jeffersonian ideal as the answer to our current farming crisis, though he himself is not a farmer. That said, it's important to note that when the editor stays in the background and allows his writers to speak, the stories they tell are vivid and alive with multi-layered emotions.

One would be hard-pressed to find an example of ``everyday folk'' that wasn't a parody on small-town naivete in ``Broke Heart Blues,'' the 29th novel by the ubiquitous Joyce Carol Oates. Set in Willowsville, N.Y., population 5,640, circa 1960, the inbred community is merely a backdrop for a story that focuses on the nature of celebrity and how easily a myth can take hold in backwater locales.

When John Reddy Heart, a recently arrived 16-year-old high school student, murders a long-standing member of the community, a man whom Heart found naked in his mother's bedroom late one night, the town is awash in rumor. Told almost exclusively from the point of view of an amorphous ``we'' - the collective first-person of Heart's schoolmates - the story depicts Heart as an idol to the boys and a heartthrob to the girls while maintaining his tough-guy silence throughout. Ultimately, the lives of Heart's classmates are irrevocably altered by the creation of this myth and its evolution over the following 30 years.

Unfortunately, there's no real sense of the idiosyncratic manner of small towns and the individuals that comprise them in ``Broke Heart Blues.'' With the hamlet of Willowsville, Oates has created a one-dimensional hotbed of gossip populated by small-minded people, a town so dubiously innocent it's easily bowled over by the James Dean-type caricature of John Reddy Heart. The rich earthiness and personal texture found in the Mason memoir and the best of Wolf's anthology are completely lacking. The plot is far-fetched to the point of strained credulity, and the characters, instead of exuding a sense of individuality, are just parodies of well-known stereotypes.

John Reddy Heart, the hero of the work, for example, is shown in so few character details - other than the mythologized version his classmates have created - that there's little insight into what motivates him or why his community needs to lionize him. When his background is finally given, two-thirds of the way through the novel, its too little, too late.

The most outrageous character is John Reddy's mother, Dahlia Heart, a tired satire of a vamp we've all seen before. Known to the townsfolk as the ``White Dahlia'' for her exclusively white wardrobe, ``she's a woman you gotta kiss or kill.''

A former blackjack dealer who is rumored to have swindled an old man out of his house in order to gain access to the upper-middle-class life of Willowsville, Dahlia breaks the hearts of all the men around her; she's a woman who gets what she wants.

Readers who want a true glimpse into the small-town life and the real individuals who reside there - in other words, readers looking for something more than satire - will not find it in this novel. Though ``Broke Heart Blues'' is meant to be a meditation on how a blank canvas can be the receptacle for the communal longings of an entire citizenry, the narrative remains little more than the blank canvas it is trying to imitate.

``Clear Springs: A Memoir''

by Bobbie Ann Mason 

(298 pages, Random House; $25)

Our rating: Four Stars

``An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk''

by Edited by Robert Wolf

(368 pages, Oxford University Press; $30)

Our rating: Three Stars

``Broke Heart Blues''

by Joyce Carol Oates

(384 pages, Dutton; $24.95)

Our rating: Two Stars