The Shipping News.

As a wife and daughter, the mother of three, the sister of seven, and the aunt of twenty, I spend a lot of time hunting for birthday, wedding anniversary, and graduation cards. Not long ago, browsing in the "Relationships section" of the Hallmark Cards display, I discovered "Fear of Commitment" greeting cards. One Contemporary Card shows two snakes intimately intertwined: "I've Got You Under My Skin, Babe," the male snake says. The female snake protests: "But you shed it every three weeks." Another card earnestly confesses: "`Love' has always been a pretty scary word for me. Maybe it's because along with the word `love' came `commitment' and `responsibility'..."

The word commitment used to have a hard edge. Literally, it could mean physical confinement; figuratively, it connoted a kind of voluntary self-confinement to a set of binding duties or roles. Today, in contemporary usage, it has been reduced to the sentimental vocabulary of short-term romantic and sexual relationships. The personal ad columns are filled with appeals for committed relationships- which, in many cases, means intimate living-together relationships with no strings attached.

The mushiness of the word commitment reflects a weakening of the ideal itself. Even marriage, the classic form of commitment, has become fragile and impermanent, as the American divorce rate, the highest in the Western world, shows. And there seems to be generational momentum behind trends of weakening commitment. Younger Americans, raised in the midst of the divorce revolution, yearn for lasting marriages but are increasingly perplexed and confused about how to achieve this goal.

Perhaps because of this growing confusion and failure, many experts are now calling for schools to offer special health courses in "relationships." Relationship education might not be a bad idea, but it doesn't require a new curriculum. Stories, both old and new, provide a way of understanding what commitment means and requires. E. Annie Proulx's 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Shipping News (Touchstone, $12,337 pp.) is a meditation on how fragile people construct strong bonds. Its central character, Quoyle, is a young father urmoored by grief over the accidental death of his adulterous wife and left to raise his two small daughters alone. Castoff and adrift, Quoyle is rescued by a long-forgotten aunt, who leads the family back to their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, in a land of slippery rocks and treacherous waters, the father, aunt, and daughters struggle to find attachment.

The "starting over" story is the great American story, and one expects Quoyle to put down roots or sprout wings. But The Shipping News offers a third possibility. Its central metaphor and motif is the knot, the handmade contrivance that mediates between water and land, tying down all that would otherwise float away. One of the great delights of this book is that it is stuffed with the language and lore of knots, gleaned from a 1944 book on knots that Proulx bought for a quarter at a yard sale. We learn about ornamental knots made from hair; knots formed by human handholds; knots created from pieces of rope; knots woven into braids, leashes, restraints; knots with a hitch or a slip or a snarl. All this would be mere arcana if it did not reinforce the book's larger theme: that commitment both binds us and holds us fast. For Quoyle, a fumble-fingered man, the triumph comes in learning to fashion sound knots.

Perhaps the best stories about the nature and meaning of commitment are found in children's literature. Eric Knight's 1940 classic Lassie Come Home (Henry Holt and Company, $16.95) has been reissued in a new edition for younger children by Rosemary Wells, with illustrations by Susan Jeffers. Forget about the television series, where Lassie is cast as a canine EMT. The original Lassie story is about the tenacity and permanence of bonds. Lassie belongs to a poor coal mining family; when the father loses his job and can find no other way to put food on the table, he takes the desperate step of selling Lassie to a rich duke. Yet, as the family discovers, Lassie is not governed by the rules of the marketplace. Lassie is a one-family dog, stubborn in his attachments which cannot be alienated or bartered but serve only to guide him home. As another decidedly countercultural view of commitment, consider a holiday rereading of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" (The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, translated by Erik Christian Haugaard, Anchor Books/Doubleday, $16.95, 1,101 pp.). Until I picked it up again recently, I had forgotten that it is all about unwavering love.