Home for the Holidays : HOME: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own, Edited by Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer <i> (Pantheon: $22; 235 pp.)</i>

“The house is a machine for living,� proclaimed Le Corbusier. Like many modernist architects, Corbusier was aggressively utopian in temperament; he believed that his buildings, and the ideals from which they were fashioned, had the power to shape the lives unfolding inside them. Imagine how he must have felt when the residents of his progressive apartment building, the Unite d’Habitation, hung chintz curtains across its grid of windows and filled its stark rooms with antique furniture, gaudy throw rugs and kitsch paintings. Humans are unruly. Despite an architect’s best intentions, the homes we inhabit are boxes--beautiful or banal, cramped or grand--that hold the squalor of our foibles and affections.

The contributors to “Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own� are a refreshingly dystopian lot. Which is not to suggest that they indulge in reckless family exposes. Instead, the 18 writers in this anthology invite you into remembered rooms, and they do so with a combination of insight, candor and artfulness that makes “Home� a consistently hospitable and interesting place.

Sallie Tisdale’s “Basement� is a portrait of a grandmother who marched her three grandchildren into a windowless basement for the duration of every family visit, admonishing them not to touch anything. The reader is made all the more indignant because Tisdale is too wise a writer to milk the situation for pity. Instead, she dwells on her oblique rebellions: trying to crack the grandmother’s safe, hefting the weight of bronze baby shoes she is forbidden to touch and finally unearthing a red scooter she and her siblings kept hidden beneath the stairs, their frenzied circles a protest against the close, subterranean air. When the 12-year-old Tisdale is finally allowed back upstairs, she heads straight for a clothesline where she vaults into the air on a pulley and dangles high above a hillside, “snapping free like my mother’s clean cotton sheets in the sweet cool breeze.�

The mysterious and contradictory behavior of adults figures prominently in these memoirs. For Karen Karbo’s mother, the dining room is a vortex of impeccable etiquette and laborious buffets. Reserved for formal occasions and holidays, this is the room in which her mother once appeared wearing red leotards and horns for a Halloween meal. When the teenaged Karbo asks her, “Are you a devil, or what?� her mother says, “The devil, sweetheart.� Karbo infuses her observations with a tart exasperation. Her second-person narrative is hilarious, but never at the expense of the conservative mother who values self-control above other virtues. That Karbo can sustain this tone without one note of condescension is no small feat, and it is a tone that becomes all the more chilling as a tumor slowly destroys her mother’s capacity for self-control.

These pages are filled with the kind of details that etch a childhood place into the deep recesses of memory, that distinguish the sensual life of one family from another. With prose that is at once extraordinary and spare, Mona Simpson evokes meals of “fruit pies with their dark lace tops� and “eggs, beautifully cooked, the ruffled waves centered on a green plate.� Her childhood kitchen pulses with “soft, repetitive sounds, varieties of ticking. The gosling’s peeping, not plaintive but soothing even to itself like the sound of knitting.�

These verbal distillations give the collection its pungency and will make readers feel as if they have embarked on a tour with a stranger who will not remain anonymous for long. Rooms, drawers, the confines of privacy itself are opened for inspection.

And yet, no matter how cozy and insular, few of these homes are exempt from the world’s turmoil. While focusing on familial experience in the 1960s, Henry Louis Gates Jr. captures the tenor of his West Virginia community, as well as that of black communities across the country. In Gates’ living room, the large family gathers around the television set to watch news of the civil rights movement. The siblings react with enthusiasm to the speeches of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Gates’ father, however, enunciates all of King’s names in order to “drag out his scorn.� Starved for images of African Americans, the children monitor the various shows and yell out, “Colored, colored on Channel 2!� Gates is at his mischievous best in a passage where he recounts seeing Douglas Sirk’s melodrama “Imitation of Life,� about a light-skinned black girl who disavows her dying, darker-skinned mother. Gates is “boo-hooing traumatized young all over the place,� swearing to his mother that he will “never, ever try to pass for white.�

Companion pieces by Collin and Kathryn Harrison (“The Master Bedroom� and “The Children’s Room�) address the rigors of parenthood. Sleep-deprived, vigilant, these parents sense the autonomous lives of their children with what the father terms “an intimate animal knowledge.� Hearing an unidentifiable noise in the night, the father’s imagination moves “like a phantom down the stairs.� The groggy mother is impelled across the hall to check on her children and, once in the stillness of their room, falls asleep on the floor and wakes to a geography of scattered toys. A frank and affecting helplessness charges these dual memoirs: In an effort to protect their children, confides Kathryn Harrison, “We redress the hurts of our own childhood, we do it even with abundant evidence that our efforts rarely matter.�

Jane Smiley not only reminisces about the bathrooms glistening in her past but speculates on the Uber-Bathroom. To this end, Smiley is proscriptive, and no fixture, counter top or tile escapes her scrutiny. “The main reason for a mirror in the bathroom,� she concludes, “is to silver the ambient light and thereby lift the spirit.� The shower head “should be at least six and a half feet high, and the water pressure strong enough to blast away thought.� Her expertise is the result of patient research in the bathtubs of Iceland, France and on Crete. One could reasonably expect the author’s fingers to be quite wrinkled by now. It is our perfect right to be self-centered in the bathroom, she assures us. Of all our rooms it is “the most forgiving . . . the only place in the house where you can bleed in peace.�

And so the ruminations go, from basement to attic, from the sturdy Washington, D.C., porch of Richard Bausch to a phantasmagoric luau room, the lifelong dream of wily fictioneer Gish Jen.

In other parts of the house, you’ll find Lynda Barry, Tony Early, Sharon Sloan Fiffer, James Finn Garner, Alex Kotlowitz, Clint McCowan, Susan Power, Esmeralda Santiago and Bailey White.

The afterword by Allan Gurganus is an annotation of the various objects that clutter his New York apartment. A portrait in his bedroom contains Abraham Lincoln’s “messianically human mud pie of a face.� An old clock on his desk “still shudders with orgiastic knock-kneed release.� Gurganus’ linguistic virtuosity is like an aperitif, the tangy, intoxicating end to an unforgettable visit.