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Ms. [Nancy Potter] takes her central theme from one of the great dilemmas of our time - the disappearance of community. In ''Legacies,'' families have drifted apart, neighborhoods scarcely exist. People live in dou-ble-wide trailers and communicate by perfunctory phone calls. In ''A Thin Place,'' a woman lives alone in a trailer in a Western suburb where it is ''illegal to build a house'' and where cocky little girls grow up wanting to be cocktail waitresses.

In his previous novels and essays, Mr. [Ariel Dorfman] (a Chilean citizen who teaches literature and Latin American studies at Duke University, and who lives in the United States) has explored the connections between language and politics. Like George Orwell, he has written wonderfully on mass culture and popular literature; his ''How to Read Donald Duck'' and ''The Empire's Old Clothes'' are insightful accounts of the way cartoon heroes and children's books shape public consciousness. But Orwell's fictional investigations into language and politics stayed pretty much within the boundaries of conventional realistic narrative. In Mr. Dorfman's work, we encounter a new type of political novel, one that takes enormous risks. He tackles political themes in ways that may seem disorienting to readers accustomed to political novels that depend exclusively upon straightforward narrative, true-to-life characters and historical realism. One of Mr. Dorfman's main achievements in fiction has surely been his ability to create methods of storytelling that enact, not merely record, a political vision, that fuse both the political and literary imaginations. In ''The Last Song of Manuel Sendero,'' published in the United States last year, Mr. Dorfman pushed the premise of Gunter Grass's ''Tin Drum'' into deeper literary territory. Where Mr. Grass created a 3-year-old protagonist whose protest takes the form of refusing to grow up, Mr. Dorfman weaves into a complex narrative the voices of revolutionary fetuses who refuse to be born.