Life Among the Meanderthals : TRIANGULATION <i> by Jack Stephens (Crown: $18.95; 282 pp.) </i>

In a day or two or a week or two, depending on family tradition and energy, the Christmas trees will come down, a skeletal process having more to do with the logic of wires than the illogic of beauty.

A novel is both mantling and dismantling; it puts itself away after putting itself up. If it uses a plot or plots--and most novels still do--it tries to find an ending worthy of its beginning and middle. This does not mean that the ending needs to match the preceding discovery and excitement. What it should do, often quietly, is to fix them with a seal; like raising a flag after climbing a mountain, or framing a picture once it has been painted.

“Triangulation” lacks a frame or a seal. Instead of being gathered up, Jack Stephens’ Christmas tree teeters over in a shower of needles and broken ornaments. But it is a lovely tree.

His story about a dozen colliding and far-fetched lives in and about Baltimore and the Maryland shore is what you hope a first novel will be, and hardly ever is. Talent outruns technique but only because talent is running so very fast. Running just as fast, in unlikely couples, are absurdity with tenderness and a canny peacefulness with unbelted anarchy.

Above all, Stephens has something to say of his own about contemporary life. He gives us a marvelous static, and from underneath the static, he draws out a few persistent voices.

“Triangulation” sets a series of characters going about their respective businesses, ranging from mildly odd to outright crazy. The oddness comes not so much from themselves as from their mutual disconnection, even though they wander through the same streets and continually intersect. Our modern world, in other words: odd.

Among them, to give an idea of the variety, are a medical statistician named Guy, a kleptomaniac fortune teller, an accident victim, a woman with a congenitally deformed arm, an amateur astronomer, two moonshiners, a pair of detectives, a grounded astronaut, a helicopter pilot and others.

A thread of plot declares the randomness. A half-mad conceptual artist--Stephens makes contemporary art part of the static--goes around Baltimore igniting tiny Molotov cocktails in public lavatories. He then clips out newspaper photographs of burned-out toilets and mounts them on large buttons.

Appropriately, he calls himself Meander, and part of the action involves various of the characters in Meander’s zigzag trail. The detectives meander lethargically after him. One of them spends his time tying dry-flies and speaking in today’s interrogative of non-assertion. “You’re under arrest?”

Under the meander, though, some are trying to walk a path, and they acquire the notable concentration of swimmers in a whirlpool.

Cordelia, one of whose arms is tiny and comes to a two-fingered prong, is looking for a man who can give her a baby. Her solution is bizarre, but Stephens surmounts the bizarre by writing of her with a wonderful delicacy.

Markley, an amateur astronomer, has built himself an observatory in an old silo (“vessel of foresight to vessel of vision”). His passion is to discover a new comet. Again, Stephens’ writing fuses post-modern oddness with a tenderly detailed account of the observatory and its workings. A belching, precarious corn-whiskey still, operated by two retired Chesapeake watermen right beside Markley’s silo, is another conjunction of comic oddity with a true pleasure in the way people make things.

Then there are the two central figures. One is Sophie, raped in college and living in a kind of carefree denial ever since. Until she is sideswiped by a truck and knocked into a ditch, where she lies, grievously injured, for three days. Her long stay in the hospital is a double recovery; she learns to live with pain as an equal.

She also falls in love, through a series of notices in the Personals section of the paper. These consist of letters between R., who writes passionately, and Guy, who stays aloof. Sophie, signs herself C.--it stands for “chartreuse,” the color of her bruises--and joins in.

In fact, Guy writes the R. letters as well as his own. He is trying to find something more spacious and mysterious than his current affair. He is dating a woman whose own space is so important to her that the only permitted love-making consists of mutual massage with a machine called Big Max. “More oil,” she commands, lying face down. “Shall I check under the hood?” he inquires.

Guy is a rudderless joke, in a way, a contemporary Everyman; but he has been brought up against the realities that contemporary life tends to conceal. He is a research statistician working on AIDS; he goes to the afflicted to gather their statistics; he comes away with their pain. It makes him desperate, and human.

All the wanderers converge at the Maryland State Fair in a spectacular denouement. It is messy and forced. Stephens is trying to tie everything together in a pyrotechnical mix of slapstick and melodrama. Instead, it all flies apart; the characters who possessed such individuality and grace as they wandered, lose everything but activity when they arrive.

But “Triangulation,” a work of enchantment and gravity, has done a great deal. It is about the simultaneity of modern life; the mind-numbing rattle of indistinguishable events, each occupying its allotted few seconds of public attention. And it is about the ability of men and women to preserve their idiosyncrasy, to hear their own voices in the din, and to keep on using them.