Focal Points

By R.Z. Sheppard

FAMILY PICTURES by Sue Miller

Harper & Row; 389 pages; $19.95

The thumping message in Sue Miller's previous novel, The Good Mother, was that society has a double standard when judging parental behavior. The man who cats around is not necessarily a bad father, but if a woman (even one who is estranged from her spouse) has a sleep-over friend, she is a bad mother. The issue can be overstated or, as was the case with The Good Mother, overprogrammed. Yet the underlying truth cannot be quibbled away.

Much the same could be said about Miller's second novel, Family Pictures. The message is that women with autistic children have been made to bear the burden and the guilt for the misfortune. Appropriately, the setting is Chicago, home of the late psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, whose judgmental views on the causes of autism hang over the Eberhardt family. Underscoring the theme is David Eberhardt, an orthodox Freudian psychiatrist. Mother Lainey navigates with less theory and more emotion -- no small undertaking with six children, including the autistic Randall.

The narrator, daughter Nina, is a photographer. Hence the novel's title, which suggests the documentation of the Eberhardt chronicle from 1940 to 1985. Nina's task is to make sense out of the Randall effect. It emerges slowly in the weave of story lines about the lives and times of Nina's parents and siblings. Her climactic musing over the family photos arranged before her: "Which had the most power? Freud? That analytic version of my parents' life, which insisted that Randall -- and their misery -- had its source in my mother's wackiness and should be struggled against, fought, cured? Or the annunciations, which said, in effect, that Randall was holy, that the failure was my father's in not accepting what was a given, what was fate."

Randall's fate is that he is seldom more than a wobbly focus of contention around which Miller examines the enigmas of matrimonial and blood ties. The breakup of the Eberhardt marriage and the difficulties of the children as they come of age in the counterculture 1960s and self-absorbed '70s are plausible with or without the issue of autism. In fact, when Miller is at her most perceptive and sympathetic, Randall, Bettelheim and Freud seem incidental baggage to this otherwise affecting family novel about changing values and resilient affections.