Untrue Love

By MARGARET CARLSON

HARRY AND CATHERINE: A LOVE STORY

by Frederick Busch

Knopf; 290 pages; $18.95

Frederick Busch's characters are lonely, especially when they are with other people. Despite the title, love is in short supply in this tale of Catherine, her two adolescent sons, one lover and a dog living in cold upstate New York. The dog has the best relationships.

The love story is supposed to begin when Harry, her former lover, reappears on Catherine's doorstep after twelve years. Harry is back because he has pined for Catherine intermittently, but also because he conveniently works for a Senator who wants to block a shopping mall that would disturb a black cemetery in Catherine's town. Catherine's live-in boyfriend, whom she ejects almost immediately, is a contractor who will profit from paving the parking lot.

The subplot -- the successful effort to save the cemetery -- turns out to be more interesting than the central question of whether Harry and Catherine can find true love. They are like David and Maddie of Moonlighting -- coming together, going apart, ever off balance -- but without the humor or irony. Every single movement of the two characters is chronicled, like a time-motion study. When Catherine is done preparing a meal and cleaning it up, a recurring activity, the reader is left exhausted and with dishpan hands.

What's missing is any sense that Catherine's oft-stated love for her sons is strong enough to put them before herself. Divorced from the boys' father, she takes up with Harry, then the parking-lot magnate, then Harry again, and her sons are understandably bewildered. When the younger one asks for some answers, she comforts him with "life is an amazing bitch." The real truth Busch misses is that adult love is a feather compared to the attachments children make. While Catherine's unwillingness to give reassurance to her sons when she has none to give is admirable for its honesty, Busch would have had a deeper love story if he had considered the notion of Catherine's waiting to welcome Harry into her life until she had some reassurances to give.