THE SIZE OF THE WORLD.

Joan Silber. Norton. 322 pages. $23.95.

Home, that place where the heart is, establishes itself in surprising, often out-of-the way corners for many of the characters in Joan Silber's quietly searching new novel. Annunziata, born in Sicily and unhappily uprooted to post-World War II Hoboken, N.J., only stays because of her husband. ''If blood won't keep people tied, there's nothing to hold them,'' she declares, articulating the distinction between those who are connected and those who are detached that runs like a seam through the book.

Nerdy, loner and engineer Toby surprises himself, while visiting Vietnam to help solve a problem with U.S. fighter planes, when he marries Toon, a Thai nurse, and settles in with her extended family. During an earlier era, after Corinna loses both parents in a Florida hurricane, she travels to colonial Siam to live with her brother Owen, a tin prospector, and discovers an engagement with person and place that she might never have anticipated.

In a novel constructed in the form of six connected narratives, the size of the world turns out to be fluid, simultaneously expansive and small enough to permit characters to link and overlap, as if in some cross-cultural global village. Toon will reappear as a friend of Annunziata's daughter Viana, during a time of crisis in Bangkok. Silber charts journeys geographical and emotional in each of the narratives, and Viana's includes rejection by her family for moving East to marry a Thai doctor, although her story does not end there.

In the book's closing chapter, Owen reappears, returned from Siam to the United States after a bout of malaria ruined his health. Struggling to re-establish himself, he finds work that will eventually lead to the faulty guidance systems that set the first story, Toby's, in motion. Silber's circularity and her conclusion that pulls together seemingly random figures is reminiscent of her previous book, the linked story collection Ideas of Heaven, short-listed for the National Book Award.

But this new volume is insistently called a novel, leaving the reader reaching reflexively for more than mere contact points among the stories. Lovers of the single linear plot should look elsewhere. This is fiction without a single over-arching narrative, opting instead for themes and patterns and echoes. In this world, the companionless can find themselves unexpectedly involved -- Owen with tough cookie Pearl; Corinna with British teacher Christopher; Toby with Toon; Mike with widowed Viana. Then there's the running thread of political conscience. Corinna connects her father's failed pursuit of wealth in America to Owen's acquiescence in the plundering of Siam's tin: ''My brother and my father were decent men, both of them, pulled along by the machine of greed.'' Owen comes to see that his work has made him ``a cog in a corrupt machine.''

Wars in Europe and the Far East impinge repeatedly, and the casual atrocities visited on innocent Vietnamese peasants quickly convince Toby that the conflict there is a disaster: ''The point had been lost . . . we were spreading evil instead of containing it.'' If this statement were not made resonantly enough, his daughter, born minus a hand because of Toby's exposure to Agent Orange, underlines it.

And then there's Thailand (earlier, Siam), first colonized, later home to a ''nasty little civil war,'' yet a sort of savage Eden for Corinna and a surrogate home to Viana and Toby. Thailand's people and culture will color Owen's attitude to female companionship so powerfully that, back in America, he can find comfort only in the arms of Asian prostitutes.

Delicate in its evocation of inner and outer landscapes, The Size of the World offers plentiful satisfactions and insights. But there are frustrations, too. While Silber brings a limpid grace to her character portraits and a polished economy to their histories, her political insights are less striking, and her repeated concern over weaving a conclusion from disparate threads suggests at the least an overdeveloped fastidiousness.

These people, after all, are already tied: by the distances they have traveled, the intimacy they have sought and sometimes found, by glimpses of larger horizons. And then there's one other linking element, which several of them refer to as a means of framing the world and which Silber herself offers as a free currency -- and that's imagination.

Elsbeth Lindner is a writer in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

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