Ordinary People : BRIEF LIVES <i> By Anita Brookner (Random House: $19; 262 pp.) </i>

Anita Brookner, a writer of great skill and precision (“Hotel du Lac,” “Lewis Percy”), has set herself a formidable task: to devise an engaging novel about the long interdependent association-- friendship would be far too extravagant a word--of two sterile and self-centered women.

Neither one has an ounce of humor or spontaneity, an unconventional philanthropic thought, an overriding passion beyond the continual polish of her own self-presentation. Neither has a child or an enduring emotional attachment--even with a husband or lover. Everything, save the strange and mutually antagonistic magnetism that binds them to each other--is pure habit, turned to stone.

Faye Langdon, timid and retiring, determined for most of her life to uphold “standards,” narrates the story, and we are lulled into seeing events from her perspective. Her adulthood has contained so few high points--the war years when she sang popular songs on the radio; her initial infatuation with her husband and, much later, the surprise of his death; her affair with a married man conducted virtually without any declaration of affection on either side--that each nuance is mulled over, rationalized and treated seriously. With no one and nothing to think about save herself, Faye treats her small store of experience the way an obsessive numismatist might endlessly rearrange and pore over her collection of coins.

By far the most interesting--in the sense of unusual--personality in Faye’s circle is the wife of her husband’s business partner. A former actress of some apparent renown, Julia is older than Faye and has made an art of her own self-importance. So powerful is her conviction that she should be attended and deferred to that she has attracted what can only be described as a coterie of ladies-in-waiting, a fluctuating group of sad-sack, lonely women who seem to absorb the insults Julia rains upon them while somehow basking in her fading glory. Even Faye eventually wonders, “Why was it impossible to enter her presence without a full quota of compliments, almost as if she were the object of some religious cult?”

Hauteur may be compelling, but in Julia’s case we are led to believe it is positively enslaving. Beneath her heavy lids, good skin and penchant for sardonic one-liners, she is hollow, unpleasant and vain--fascinating in her studied awfulness:

“Her feelings were so far from the surface, so deeply buried, that they gave her no information. This conferred an undeniable dignity, for she never lost her composure, or, more accurately, her command.” For all her immobility--Julia rarely leaves her house for years--she has about her a vibrancy that is irresistible, and Faye, like it or not, remains the moth to her flame.

Brookner is justly celebrated for her ability to communicate the significance of the crises and triumphs that punctuate the lives of ordinary people. In book after book, her meticulous examination of character suggests that nothing doesn’t matter, that each man and woman, no matter how drab or ineffectual they may appear to the casual observer, has an inner complexity worth knowing. With prose as quiet and fine as tiny brush strokes, she accumulates subtle facts and reactions until suddenly we know her people from the inside. Their intimate concerns become our own.

Signature passages of brilliant writing abound in “Brief Lives,” hard-won insights that startle us with Brookner’s clarity and succinct intelligence: “There is a murky area in women which deepens once old alliances are invaded by a man,” Faye concludes. “Once women learn not to trust each other there is no going back.”

Though “Brief Lives” often reads more like a series of striking portraits or an extended meditation on the frustrations of passivity than a fully realized novel, every so often within the text there appears a description or metaphor that is so absolutely fresh that applause seems called for. The aging Faye likens young people in her neighborhood to “Strauss polkas” as they head off to their jobs. Julia is said to be “an unreliable mixture of the calculating and the obtuse,” while of her deceased husband, Charlie, we are told: “Dead, he was as discreet as he had been in life.”

In the end, Faye claims that she eventually lost “the patience for good behavior,” but she nevertheless continues to behave well, for it is not in her nature to rebel. “Hope,” she decides, “is the greatest of all encumbrances,” and yet she never altogether stops wondering what comes next, never stops wishing that something wonderful and fulfilling will happen to her.

As readers who know her better than she knows herself, we are aware that this transcendence is highly unlikely. Her life is and will remain the sum of all the choices she deferred or was talked into, brief not in its duration but in its intensity. Sadly, it was over before it ever really began.