A Warmer Season<i> by Joseph Olshan (McGraw-Hill: $15.95; 252 pp.)</i>

Daniel Fell, a 17-year-old Jewish boy transplanted from Italy to Westchester County, N.Y., must cope with the increasing estrangement of his parents while serving as confessor-mediator to two separate Italian-American families. The misunderstandings and rifts in all three families form the marrow of Daniel’s coming-of-age in Joseph Olshan’s second novel, “A Warmer Season.”

In his senior year of high school, Daniel loses his virginity to classmate Julietta. The sexy Julietta has already spurned the attentions of popular quarterback Gianni Scaravento, so Daniel is surprised when Gianni goes out of his way to befriend him. Listening to the late-night musings of Gianni’s charismatic mother, Angela, who is wasting away with Hodgkin’s disease, Daniel grows as close to her as her own sons.

Meanwhile Julietta’s feared cousins, the Polanno brothers, want a favor from Daniel: to use his fluent command of Italian to convince their mother that they didn’t slaughter a score of zoo animals, a crime of which they’ve long been suspected. Daniel’s acquiescence so angers Angela Scaravento that she stops speaking to him.

By novel’s end, Daniel, now a freshman at Amherst, has had to come to terms with the backfiring of his attempted rescue of the Polanno brothers’ slimy reputations, the fall from grace of his friend Gianni, Angela’s death, and his own parents’ divorce.

Like Olshan’s first novel, “Clara’s Heart,” “A Warmer Season” carries a strong sense of an adolescent’s knowledge of the forbidden, gained from conversations surreptitiously overheard. The mystery of sex is handled deftly, whether it’s the allure of Daniel’s beautiful but selfish mother, or the barely glimpsed vulnerability of a “fast” Italian girl. In Daniel’s first sexual encounter, with Julietta in the back of a friend’s darkened van, a ball rolls annoyingly, repeatedly in the way, but Daniel won’t move to dispose of it for fear he won’t be able to penetrate Julietta again. This kind of ironic detail sometimes saves “A Warmer Season” from basking in the maudlin.

But the novel begins to blister badly and early when Olshan introduces the Polanno brothers and their “problem.” Daniel’s defense of the boys is an absurdity we know their mother won’t buy. Olshan assumes the reader will automatically share the horror of the animal killings--”The slaughter of helpless zoo animals is a misdeed difficult to forget”--and dramatizes the “misdeed” with only one, hopelessly inadequate sentence. So the attendant misunderstandings--Angela’s refusal to talk to Daniel, Julietta’s rejection of him, the Polannos’ anger when their ruse doesn’t work--all remain unconvincing.

Too often, Olshan withholds crucial information until the end of a scene. A conversation will begin with small talk and limp along until a character blurts out some startling bit of news. Olshan seems more interested in Daniel’s reaction to a crisis than in the various ways a crisis may be presented, thereby robbing his other characters of blood and bone.

To compensate, Olshan puts sandwich boards around these characters so we can identify them. As soon as we’re introduced to quarterback Gianni Scaravento, for instance, Daniel tells a friend that the Italian translation of Scaravento is To hurl myself. The most effective advertising isn’t necessarily the most direct.

At times, Olshan is just careless. He gives no indication of period until late in the second chapter, when Daniel’s mother goes to see “Hair” on Broadway; a description of a diner further suggests that we’re in the early ‘70s, but there’s almost no other reference--political, cultural, decorative--that would help us get a fix on the era. He has Daniel hearing radio ads on WNEW in New York for a rock concert in Michigan.

This is all the more maddening in “A Warmer Season” because Olshan is capable of writing prose that sings. He is skillful at re-creating the geography of Westchester, its diners and highways as well as the way its attractive towns are laid out (Jewish, upper-middle-class homes in the hills; Italian, middle-class homes in the flats). As he did so often in “Clara’s Heart,” where the smell of Touch of Fire signals the arrival of the protagonist’s Jamaican governess, Olshan uses scents--of despair, of desire, of the bottles on a mother’s dressing table--to maximum effect.

There are also descriptions that are as sensual as they are accurate. Ingrid Bergman’s face in “Casablanca” has “warm silver running beneath her skin.” The static in a girl’s tawny hair causes strands of it to cling to Daniel’s denim jacket. The East River twirls “around itself like a liquid rope.”

These are observations by a writer with an exact eye and a poetic hand. But, for the most part, Olshan has let his muscles atrophy in “A Warmer Season.” Reaching for poignancy, Olshan too often comes up with only that by-product of so many coming-of-age novels, preciousness. Next time out, he should give himself a more rigorous workout and construct a plot that can support his sweet turns of phrase.