THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER
By Ann Packer
Knopf. 370 pp.
Reviewed by Kate Lehrer

Suppose you are 23 years old and engaged to a charming, caring person you have dated since you were 14. Suppose every day you still see your friends from high school and college. Suppose you are starting to imagine yourself another life. Then suppose your fiancé {acute}, showing off because of your withdrawal from him, has an accident that leaves him a quadriplegic. What would you do? What should you do?

Ann Packer asks this question in her gracefully written and provocative debut novel. Already established as a short-story writer, she broadens her scope with insights as varied and opposite as the fabrics and designs that her protagonist, Carrie Bell, works with at her beloved sewing machine. A metaphor for this stage of her life, the cutting and stitching become her escape from building pressures. "It was the inexorability of it that appealed to me," she explains, "how a length of fabric became a group of cut-out pieces that gradually took on the shape of a garment." The problem is that she's not sure just which garment she seeks for herself.

For years, Carrie thought she knew. Although she and her mother lived a quiet life, Madison, Wis., suited her. Her best friend, Jamie, was as close as a sister, and they got along better than siblings do. She fell in love with Mike Mayer and adored the energy of his family. Her life worked until the sameness of it began to stifle her. A year after college graduation, her friends are still telling high-school jokes, and Carrie sees this as "a symptom of whatever we all had, whatever disease it was that had us doing the exact same things we'd always done, and with the exact same people."

Suddenly the normal evolution of youthful restlessness stops with Mike's accident. Not only does she feel an obligation, and need, to stay with him; their friends and his family also make their own demands on her. Under the strain, she flees to Manhattan one night without telling anyone. Her mother understands; the others blame her, as she blames herself.

Life in Manhattan is different. In Madison, Carrie had her own apartment. Now, thanks to an old school friend, she moves into an alcove of a house teeming with aspiring young boarders. Though she had been responsible and employed in Madison, she doesn't bother to look for a job, thinking that she will return home. Falling in love with a 40-year-old man nicknamed Kilroy only complicates her decision. And Kilroy is as complicated as Mike is easygoing.

A well-read sophisticate schooled in the mores of New York, Kilroy has renounced worldly ambition to work as a temp and to play pool. Whereas Mike shared his life, Carrie has to scavenge for the secrets of Kilroy's past. Most winning in bed, he exhibits an inverse snobbery and condescension that seem more appropriate for someone Carrie's age; still, he's hard not to like. About the time he becomes impossible, he offers another part of himself, made more valuable by his need for privacy, and she accepts and forgives.

After enrolling in design classes and dreaming of a career designing clothes, Carrie returns to Madison to help her best friend through family problems. Kilroy asks her to come back, and once again she postpones a decision, struggling with all the pulls on her as she is rejected by almost everyone except Mike and her mother.

Granted, Carrie's need for separation caused pain and unnecessary cruelty, but why doesn't the selfishness of her friends and Mike's family occur to anyone? Also frustrating is the lack of fuller explanations about Kilroy, who doesn't really earn his mystery, and about Carrie's mother, who seems older than 47. And Packer could have pruned back the cooking and sewing sessions.

But these criticisms take nothing away from the overall impact of her work and the resonance of her themes of separation, friendship and family. She stays away from pat answers, leaving us to ponder her questions. This is, indeed, an elegant book.