Spare the Rod, Spoil the Horse : BREAKING GENTLE <i> by Beverly Lowry (Viking Press: $17.95; 334 pp.; 0-670-82245-0) </i>

Beverly Lowry’s new novel is about an educated middle-class couple who’ve been married for 26 years, who have done all the best they know how for their two children--and yet who find themselves facing trouble with the kids (some of it pretty bad trouble) that they just don’t know how to fix or control. “Breaking Gentle,” in short, brings us another analysis of the American nuclear family, where it seems there’s something wrong at the heart of things, although whether Lowry’s novel really finds the source of this trouble is another matter.

Hale and Diana Caldwell (he’s 48, she’s 47) have had their wobbles and uncertainties in marriage, but they’ve remained together, and they’ve remained united, too, in agreeing to rear their children in the best way possible, with tolerance and patience and generosity. The Caldwells live on a farm not far from Austin, Tex., where they raise horses (although Hale had an earlier career as an engineer, and Diana as an academic); and horse-raising provides a metaphor for what it is these parents have tried to do. There are two ways, Hale explains, of breaking young horses: one is “breaking rough”--by aggressive treatment, punishment, and the use of pain; and the other is “breaking gentle”--by patience, example and repetition. It’s the latter that the two have applied to their own children, although now Hale has his doubts; often whipped as a child himself, he “had not wanted to repeat those old patterns of abuse,” but now he fears that he may have been too lenient, too generous and tolerant: “ . . . excessive love got in the way. He’d gone too far in the other direction.”

And maybe it’s true that his children are simply spoiled, although it’s not the reader’s impression that this is the root of the matter. It seems more likely that Hale and Diana are missing something else in what they’re able to offer their kids.

The problems, in any case, don’t really seem so bad with Roger, the Caldwells’ 24-year-old son, although his plight (he seems, above all, a mild boy) is asked to carry a thematic weight in the novel in excess of its real substance: marginal in his sexual preference, Roger smokes pot (secretly from his parents), has dropped out of college, is inclined toward being a cook in countercultural restaurants in California instead of doing something more robust, and has some months earlier returned home to his old bedroom (Hale worries that he’ll never leave), explaining rather vaguely that he ought to help out with his younger sister Bethany.

And it’s true that, unlike Roger, Bethany really is a problem (and a refreshing bright spot for the reader, who’d like to see more of this smart and passionate teen-ager than of her more pallid and inertial parents). Only now turning 17, Bethany has already, in a flash of anger, thrown a kitchen knife at her mother (it left a scar near the collarbone); acquired a rather poignant and long history of kleptomania (though, supposedly, she’s a privileged kid who has everything); fallen in love with a Mexican boy from a poor background named Alex Hurtados; gotten mixed up, with Alex, in charges of car theft and weapons possession (Alex had a gun in the trunk of the stolen car) for which she’d have been prosecuted had she, instead, not gone to the Cedar Hills Therapeutic Community. Cedar Hills is an expensive and pretentiously “progressive” reform school for rich troubled kids where Bethany, after seven months as a “resident,” seems determined to gorge herself into a state of unattractive fatness.

Both Roger and Bethany, of course, are sending out classic cries of help, and one of the most puzzling things about this peculiarly unsatisfying novel is watching these kids’ presumably (one might add certifiably) enlightened parents remain blithely deaf to their cries--while the author presents them to us, at the same time, with the seeming assumption that they are listening with all their hearts.

For all the detail cascaded upon them (and it’s a lot), Hale and Diana Caldwell in the end seem realized only from the exterior and remain illustrated figures as if made up of pastiches of material taken from magazine ad copy and TV movies. One knows the design of their house (many-windowed and airy), their choice of food (spicy tacos for Sunday breakfast), who does what when they make love, but of the capacity for a real private life inside them, there’s hardly a trace.

Granted, an inward-generated life shows a glimmer of beginning when Diana sets out to “kidnap” Bethany from the sterile reform “community.” But, at end, it seems simply that no self-realization sinks in, or can sink in. After Bethany goes back to the reform school (of her own will; it’s better than home), and after Roger drifts back to California, Hale and Diana are given a long and symbolic episode about a newborn colt that almost dies but is saved by extreme (and expertly described) measures. However vivid the scene, its end effect is treacly and indulgent, a false poetic filler to give the impression of there being substance in these insubstantial parents, for whom their children, now that they’re offstage, seem mere wisps of regret in the vacuous and lumpen sentimentality of the book’s closing phrases.

Lowry’s talent and eye in the amassing of detail (including the detail of horse raising) are prodigious, and the compactness and pace of her narrative could put the writing schools to shame. But something is gone at the heart of this book, which seems to have grown from the outside in instead of from the inside out, leaving us, this time around at least, with something greatly skilled but inert, and with magazine-page parents who just won’t come when they’re called.