Total Immersion

By Allegra Goodman

Harper & Row

$16.95, 254 pp.

THERE is something about Allegra Goodman's collection of short stories, Total Immersion that reminds me of my grandmother. When my grandmother, who is from the South, tells a story, you hear about the person's relatives and the relatives' relatives, and their relatives--and so on and so on.

I often get lost in my grandmother's stories. They are filled with connections I miss, names of people I don't know and things I don't understand. But I know they would be really interesting if I could just get the people straight.

I get the same feeling from Goodman's stories, which are filled with faceless characters whose lives are enmeshed in bizarre and often unclear ways.

But, unlike my grandmother's descriptions of broken marriages and local scandals, Allegra Goodman's collection of short stories is very, very funny.

And I am impressed that it was written by a Harvard senior.

GOODMAN'S book is primarily about the problems of maintaining conservative Jewish values in unlikely settings--Hawaii and Oxford, England. Total Immersion is about identity and the problems of balancing different cultures and reconciling tradition with modern problems.

But Goodman's satirical humor is what carries the book. She writes about the hypocrisy of Jewish life in Hawaii, the fundamental impossibility of modernizing ancient Jewish law and the selfabsorption of both young and old.

Goodman describes in "Variant Text" an agnostic but rigidly observant househusband who wears an Abortion Rights button to Sabbath services and responds to a colleague's questions reagarding his faith with, "When you read a book, do you have to know the author to enjoy it?"

Goodman portrays in "Wish List" the passionate and literary obsession of a female Israeli novelist for a beautifully built worker who can only respond to her allusions to D.H. Lawrence novels with a request for some eggs.

This is just a sampling of Goodman's strange assortment of offbeat characters, who live in a fascinating world of mixed cultures.

AT the same time, however, Goodman's world is sometines difficult to understand, and her writing style is not helpful. The world she creates--whether it is in Hawaii, England or the American mainland--requires total immersion to read. With her multitude of names of the people streaming in and out her characters' lives and Goodman's frequent use of Hebrew, Yiddish and Hawaiian terms, the book is sometimes painful to wade through. Goodman writes: