BOOKS OF THE TIMES: REVIEW

Mr. [Charles Dickinson]'s novel is also charming and touching, an impressive advance from his promising first novel, ''Waltz in Marathon.'' In ''Crows,'' it is as if he had combined ''You Can't Take It With You'' with Margaret Atwood's ''Surfacing,'' yet come up with something so original that comparisons are useless. And no matter how you summarize the plot of ''Crows,'' something important always gets left out. Besides, he wants to find Ben Ladysmith's body in the waters where he disappeared, the divers from the local fire department having given up after only three days of looking. With the arrival of fall, it's gotten too cold to search the depths of Oblong Lake any more; a ''flat sheet of time'' had ''to be crossed before spring, ages away.'' So [Robert] stays blithely on, sleeping with [Ben]'s daughter, Olive, for warmth; playing checkers with Duke, the son who has lost a leg in the accident that killed Ben; trying to mollify Buzz, the angry older son who lives only to play baseball and shoot birds; telling them all Ben's crow stories, which they've never heard before - they know an altogether different Ben - and which somehow enrage them. It doesn't seem to bother Robert when he is accused of hanging around ''like death itself.''