Flip-Flopping Along

By Martha Duffy

. TITLE: THE EASY WAY OUT

AUTHOR: STEPHEN MCCAULEY

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 298 PAGES; $20

THE BOTTOM LINE: There are many routes out of a bad affair, and a sure-handed comic novelist delivers a surprising one.

It's not easy to write a character who has the power to charm. They're like witty people -- the author had better be able to suggest an elusive quality without making heavy weather of the whole matter. Stephen McCauley has that skill. The hero of The Easy Way Out is a fellow of no obvious consequence, but the reader gladly follows him through a dizzy emotional crisis.

Patrick has opted for an easy life working for an addled travel agency in Cambridge, Mass. "I could flirt with the customers, wear tight pants to work, drink at lunch, and swear on the phone," he notes, but adds, with the grace that saves him, that he wouldn't mind making "a tiny fraction of the world a better place." His lover, Arthur, wants them to buy a house together and settle down for good. But Patrick already knows that he would be "stuck in a passionless domestic relationship."

Then there are his two heterosexual brothers, whom he loves and whose interests he would like to promote. Ryan, the elder, faces a divorce he does not want. Tony is in a situation much like Patrick's: being propelled toward marriage to someone he no longer loves. The O'Neils are a close-knit clan from Boston's working-class suburbs, fiercely loyal people who are usually at cross-purposes because they find it almost impossible to speak their mind directly.

Mama Rita thinks the steady Arthur is the best thing that ever happened to Patrick. Father James is half in love with Loreen, Tony's determined fiance. In touchingly comic ways, these parents -- mismatched themselves -- are determined to see their offspring securely in wedlock, as if the kids could not function on their own.

True to the title, Patrick takes the easy way out. It isn't very admirable. McCauley builds the climax with the ingenuity of an experienced comic novelist. Curling through the book has been the saga of Patrick's efforts to get a Harvard professor and his secret mistress a scarce reservation in Bermuda. After the kind of sure but wayward plotting that marks the work of David Lodge, Britain's master of academic foolery, it turns out that Patrick gets to enjoy the booking and the island's velvet sands -- with Arthur a thousand miles north.

Stephen McCauley, 37, has had an easy career. His first novel, The Object of My Affection (1987), won critical and popular esteem that only a tiny percentage of fiction -- first or otherwise -- ever attracts. He grew up in Woburn, a Boston suburb, the middle of three brothers. After the University of Vermont, he says, "I flip-flopped along," teaching, working at a Cambridge travel agency that was "full of wonderful, slow, late-'70s atmosphere."

In 1982 the author went to Columbia for an M.F.A. degree in writing. He has taught writing at several colleges, most recently at Harvard. He lives with a friend in a leafy backwater just north of Harvard Square. Mystery writer Robert Parker is a neighbor. McCauley radiates satisfaction with his life. To listen to him is to recall his book and a passage in which someone describes a 19th century novel "as if the author and most of the characters were close friends." As surely as Victorians did, McCauley has tapped into that source.