Eyes Like Mine

How do you pick and choose among a lifetime of memories? In Cody's intelligent but frustrating second novel (after The Stolen Child), narrator Will Ross, a 37-year-old college instructor, deals with this question when he and his wife, Ann, decide to have a child and he is prompted to look back on his past. Will's memories come in spurts and waves, arising willy-nilly from various periods of his life: ninth grade, when he experimented with drink and drugs; his post-college years in a mental institution; his grad-school stint at Cornell. He also contemplates his life with Ann, his father's death, his mother's affection and visions of his own old age. Though this novel is admittedly ""largely autobiographical,"" Will remains a cipher, closely observant of others but seemingly reluctant to share his own feelings with the reader. Thus this bleak and cryptic story lacks an essential dimension. First serial rights to Harper's. (Mar.)