Bridie and Finn

Ostensibly a tale of star-crossed love, this debut novel by a playwright and TV sitcom writer offers bittersweet but hollow vignettes. Bridie and Timothy ``Finn'' Finnegan meet in January 1942 in a New Jersey fourth-grade classroom. Bridie, the extroverted child of a well-meaning alcoholic bartender, immediately considers the embarrassed Finn to be her best friend. During the WW II years, the children become inseparable. Likable but stereotypical Irish Catholic characters comprise Finn's family: the emotionally distant father; mentally fragile, institutionalized mother; all-American brother Fritz, who enlists in the service and ships out, never to return. Cauley creates minidrama after minidrama by overlapping the Finnegans' lives with multi-ethnic, but insubstantial, folk ranging from a kindly Jewish couple to an albino black boy, son of the proprietors of the local bordello. None of the situations, tragic or heartwarming, add up to much. Thanks to a shamelessly sentimental prologue, readers already know the ending, and events become less compelling as the story wears on. Cauley spends too much time constructing a chronological coming-of-age saga and not enough fleshing out his cardboard characters. (Apr.)