Summer's House

""It was a summer of no fixed addresses, of shifting homes and uncertain residence,"" reflects 17-year-old Raymond, one of the three wandering narrators of Lehman's complex, richly textured third novel (after Waterboys). Banished to his uncle's house in New Jersey after his mother learns his father has been cheating on her and takes off alone on a summer vacation to Israel, Raymond sneaks home to find that his evicted father has also secretly set up camp in the family's closed-up Manhattan apartment. Left unsupervised, Raymond divides his nights between the park, where he explores a confusing attraction to older men, and the apartment of Agatha, 10 years his senior, who has a troubling history of mental illness. The second displaced protagonist that 1970s summer is Jerome, Agatha's ex-boyfriend. A struggling writer, Jerome secretly fills his journals with Agatha's nighttime ramblings; when she tells him to ""get the hell out,'' he floats from a boarding house in Brooklyn to an abandoned loft building in SoHo. The only fixed address in Jerome's life is his job at Seven Wonders Gourmet Imports, where he drives a delivery truck for Raymond's Uncle Lester, the third protagonist. Lester's displacement is primarily financial: his gourmet grocery business is failing, his wife spends too much and Lester is too cowardly to confess his insolvency. He strives for acceptance from his neighbors in their snooty New Jersey subdivision, but secretly feels more comfortable spending time with his emotionally troubled young son, Stevie, and the subdivision's one outcast, Eddie. As the summer comes to a close, the stories of the three narrators converge. Lehman's evocative grasp of the hostility, violence and misery haunting seemingly ordinary families is almost uncomfortably lifelike. His energetic prose moves the plot along quickly, and his vivid dialogue and well-paced description make protagonists and secondary characters alike three dimensional. (June)