OF FATHERS AND SONS; THREE NOVELS EXPLORE THE TENSIONS BETWEEN GENERATIONS.

Byline: Bernadette Murphy Special to the Daily News

``Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.'' So wrote Oscar Wilde more than a hundred years ago. And indeed, the mark of maturity may be the ability to accept the mistakes parents make - grievous and venial alike - and to forge a full life with whatever your legacy may be.

It's this issue of parental culpability, as well as the transient solace found outside the consanguine circle, that links three solid new novels, all of which have boys - sons being raised by imperfect parents - at their core. Of the group, Philip Caputo's ``The Voyage'' is easily the most ambitious. A grand epic, this ocean-bound tour de force is set on the Eastern Seaboard at the turn of the previous century. The three sons of the book's tale are mere adolescents the summer their father, Cyrus Braithwaite, commands them to sail away from their Maine home in his 46-foot schooner with orders to not return for three months. He gives each - Nathaniel, age 16; Eliot, 15; and Andrew, 13 - $10 as emergency money and then sets them loose with no reason why, no direction in which to travel.

Their dubious adventure begins with the boys thinking they're being tested somehow, hoping for an accomplishment their father ``won't be able to criticize or take away.'' The journey takes the boys far from the safe harbor they have known, through storms and hurricanes, a visit to the big city of New York and a barroom brawl, and onto an exploration of a sunken ship off the Florida Keys, a ship their father had attempted to rescue many years earlier. Yet the tale ends with more questions than there will ever be answers for.

When a storm off the coast of Cuba destroys their vessel and they telegraph their father for help from the American consulate in Havana, their pleas remain unanswered. Why would their father abandon them? Why had they been banished? Why hadn't their mother intervened? These are the questions being asked now, nearly a century later by Cyrus' great- granddaughter Sylvia, who has plumbed the family history looking for answers to her own sense of familial dislocation, knowing that, ``We can change our fates if we are wise enough and strong enough, but before wisdom, before strength, there must come knowledge of the blood and all that is in it, the poisoned and the pure.''

With Caputo at the helm, the boys' seafaring expedition glistens with the splendor and menace of the sea. Throughout their adventure, the brothers struggle with the trials of growing up and begin the long road to forgiveness, which sometimes takes generations to complete.

KENT HARUF'S novel, ``Plainsong,'' on the other hand, is less about how parents fail children but rather the aftermath: how our need for parenting is so strong that we will find parental substitutes wherever they may be found.

At the center of the story are two young brothers, Ike and Bobby, trying to understand their mother's descent into deep depression and her eventual abdication of her maternal role. The boys are left alone with their father, Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher who's unsure how to raise his sons single-handedly; together, the brothers help raise each other and find a place in their world.

Miles outside of town on a dairy farm, meanwhile, live two bachelor brothers, Harold and Raymond McPheron, aged men who keep to themselves. After years of only each other's company, the brothers are set in their solitary ways. When one of Tom Guthrie's high school students, Victoria Roubideaux, gets pregnant and is thrown out by her mother, the elder McPherons are implored to help her by providing room and board.

Throughout ``Plainsong,'' the characters take chances on each other in small, seemingly inconsequential gestures and find that, by making a little extra effort - like the McPherons trying to draw Victoria into an evening's conversation when they haven't made small-talk with outsiders in decades, or the elderly lady who makes cookies for Bobbie and Ike - they unearth the only bits of grace to be found.

Haruf, whose earlier works include ``Where You Once Belonged'' and ``The Tie That Binds,'' is a terse, perceptive writer. His dialogue, especially between the individual pairs of brothers, is pitch perfect. One is reminded of the crystalline prose and cutting eye of Raymond Carver; Haruf has the same ability to see into the nature of our lives and the monumental weight of sometimes very small actions. With his sparse descriptions and flawlessly tuned ear, we're given a world rooted completely in the earthbound nature of things and the poignant, yet heartfelt, reality that lies there.

THE FLAWED NATURE of family relations explored in Haruf and Caputo's novels reaches a devastating apotheosis in Andrew O'Hagan's ``Our Fathers.'' O'Hagan is a Scottish writer whose previous work, ``The Missing,'' looked into the question of missing persons - not only victims of abduction, but those who had voluntarily walked away from their lives, as well as parents who had abandoned their children. With ``Our Fathers,'' O'Hagan turns his attention to three generations of sons in postwar Scotland and the forces that both separate and join them.

Jamie Bawn is the narrator of this tale, which spans his early childhood into his mid-30s. ``My father was an alcoholic,'' he tells us. ``The kind that rages and mourns. He never meant well, and he never did well.''

At age 13, Jamie leaves his parents - ``There are no vows between parents and their children'' - and goes to live with his grandfather, Hugh Bawn. Hugh is a man revered in the community, whose tireless work to build public housing revolutionized Scotlands postwar housing crisis; he raised great towers of flats designed to set the people free from slums. Under Hugh's tutelage, Jamie tries and fails to live up to his grandfather's greatness. Jamie's inability to follow in Hugh's footsteps ruptures the relationship, leaving the two men estranged.

The emotional heart of the novel takes place when Jamie is grown and seeks reconciliation with Hugh as the elder Bawn is dying. At the same time, public opinion on Hugh's accomplishments has turned tide amid allegations that, in his zeal for public housing, he cut corners, perhaps to line his own pockets. Hugh's mistakes are unearthed for all to see as the very flats he built so confidently a generation ago are demolished as ugly and unsafe.

Though, at first, O'Hagan's near-cryptic storytelling style takes getting used to, requiring readers to stay on their toes and put the impressionistic scenes together to be of a single piece, those who persist will be rewarded. Using a stream-of-consciousness narration reminiscent of James Joyce, O'Hagan builds emotional tension that, by the end of the work, reaches a fine-tuned pitch, reflective of his narrative mastery.

As with each of these novels, the ache of accepting parental wrongdoing, together with the overwhelming sadness that our parents may not be who we wanted them to be, shapes and gives true-to-life coloring. The uplifting parts are few, but when they appear, they shimmer in their authenticity, as with Jamie's journey from anger to a bruised acceptance of his progenitors' failings: ``I came home thinking I would take a stand against Hugh's delusions,'' Jamie tells us. ``But that is not what happened. I stood beside him, and listened to his life, and I held his hand, and I finally grew up.''

``The Voyage''

by Philip Caputo

(432 pages, Alfred A. Knopf; $26).

``Plainsong''

by Kent Haruf

(320 pages, Alfred A. Knopf; $24).

``Our Fathers''

by Andrew O'Hagan

(304 pages, Harcourt Brace & Co.; $23).

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2 photos

Photo: (1) no caption (cover of ''The Voyage'')

(2) no caption (cover of ''Plainsong'')