PATCHWORK' STITCHED WITH DEEP EMPATHY.

Byline: Jonelle Bonta Special to the Daily News

All of Anne Tyler's novels are set in the Baltimore area. None is punctuated by tragedy or disaster; the action in each book moves with the ebb and flow of life, not the rush of melodrama. Each is full of gentle surprises, as quirky and individualistic as her characters. Her main subject would seem to be how screwball a person can be and still live a relatively normal life.

``A Patchwork Planet'' is about Barnaby Gaitlin, the younger son of a wealthy old-money family (they even have their own foundation) who got in trouble as a teen-ager for breaking into homes, not to steal but to read people's mail and study family photo albums. Barnaby is divorced and has a 9-year-old daughter, Opal; his ex-wife suggests it would be better for Opal if Barnaby stopped his visits.

He lives in a basement apartment and works for Rent-A-Back, a labor service for older people who can no longer do the heavy work necessary to keep their homes. (His assignments range from driving clients to the grocery store to moving furniture to cleaning out garages and attics.) Young, good looking and making his way his own way, Barnaby is happy.

But he must face the indifference of his father and the sharp disapproval of his mother, deal with the pain of seeing his clients deteriorate and die, struggle with the nagging doubt that he may not be good for Opal, and decide what to do about Sophia, the very respectable lady he becomes involved with.

One of Tyler's major strengths has always been her uncanny ability to depict children, describing their simplistic reactions to life's complex situations with unsentimental understanding. In ``A Patchwork Planet,'' a similar rich talent is revealed - an empathy with the elderly. Rent-A-Back provides a real service that helps its elderly clients maintain a quality of life they cannot achieve alone, and Barnaby's faithfulness to a job many people would find depressing makes us like him and admire his values. The physical weakening, the desperate effort to live alone, the putting up a brave front while clinging to the last shreds of independence - Barnaby knows and understands his clients and elicits a poignant start of recognition from anyone who has ever watched their parents or grandparents age.

One client's house smells ``... of steam heat and brothy foods and just, well, oldness.'' Barnaby is there to set up her Christmas tree, to show her family she's still keeping up: ``A Christmas tree wouldn't fool her grandchildren for an instant. But she was so cheerful and determined, peering up at us half-blind and smiling brightly, her hair smoothly combed, her lipstick neatly applied.''

The struggle these people face is expressed by a formerly feisty client banished to a nursing home while her broken hip heals. Barnaby tries to cheer her up: ``What this other client was telling me just a few days ago: The older you get, the faster the time goes. By now it's all a blur, she says.''

``Wrong,'' Maud May said firmly. ``Wrong?'' ``Time has stopped dead still.''

Why do we care about this affable, ambitionless character? Because Barnaby has no ulterior motives. He knows he has disappointed the people closest to him, and he wants to figure out what to do about it. Sitting in a park one cold day after a visit with Opal, Barnaby relates his life to those of his clients and comes to terms with the fact that he squandered his marriage.

``At Rent-A-Back, I knew couples who'd been married almost forever ... They'd be tending each other's illnesses, filling in each other's faulty memories, dealing with the money troubles or the daughter's suicide or the grandson's drug addiction. And I was beginning to suspect that it made no difference whether they'd married the right person. Finally, you're just with who you're with. You've signed on with her, put in half a century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself or even better, and she's become the right person. Or the only person, might be more to the point. I wish someone had told me that earlier. I'd have hung on them; I swear I would. I never would have driven Natalie to leave me.''

Like Mies van der Rohe's ``God,'' Anne Tyler is in her details. Putting together the aging artificial Christmas tree, Barnaby muses, ``...I'd never quite adjusted to how soft the needles were. Each time I plunged my hand in among them, I felt disappointed, almost - expecting to be prickled and then failing to have it happen.''

Tyler's descriptions of her characters cut deep but without malice. Barnaby's stilted mother, who works hard to effect a casual appearance, chooses a bad hairstyle, causing Barnaby to reflect, `` ... Would I be the one to tell her? I enjoyed it. You see a woman who's reinvented herself, who's shown a kind of genius at picking up the social clues, it's a real pleasure to catch her in a blunder.''

Even Barnaby realizes it is time to grow up. ``In those photo albums I used to rifle, people were so consistent. They tended to assume the same poses for every shot, the same expressions ... What I wanted to know was, couldn't people change? Did they have to settle for just being who they were forever, from cradle to grave? ... Seated at that table ... I felt I had changed.''

``A Patchwork Planet''

by Anne Tyler

(285 pages, Knopf; $24)

Our rating: Three and one-half stars.