Young writers who snag the world's attention usually do so by virtue of their bold new voices, their daring departures from literary convention. One thinks of the 23-year-old Truman Capote, whose Other Voices, Other Rooms introduced an unmistakably original musicality to the language; or, more recently, of Dale Peck, who at 25 startled readers with the formal experimentation of his stories-as-novel, Martin and John.

Allegra Goodman was younger than either of these writers when, as a 21-year-old Harvard senior, she published her acclaimed first book of short stories, Total Immersion. Now 29, Goodman fulfills the promise of her debut with The Family Markowitz, a smartly funny collection of interwoven stories about three generations of a Jewish American family. But what makes Goodman notable among rising literary talents is precisely her lack of innovation or youthful showiness. In her sharply observed tales (many of which first appeared in the New Yorker), she jumps through no flaming literary hoops, walks no postmodern narrative high wires. Rather, she succeeds with straightforward mastery of the basics. She is a storyteller in the classic Jewish tradition.

That Goodman self-consciously places herself within this tradition is evident in her choice of title, a nod to Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Family Moskat. Goodman's technique also owes much to predecessors like Philip Roth, echoes of whose wit can be heard in the wry humor with which she unsparingly skewers her fictional family.

But if Goodman's style is not particularly new, her situations are refreshingly so -- an inevitable reflection of changes in the community she writes about. Just as Roth has chronicled the lives of second-generation American Jews breaking free from the Old World obsessions of their immigrant parents, Goodman turns her sights on the next generation, in which many of the trends have been turned on their heads.

Thus, while the parents of Roth's characters worried about their children's drifting from Jewish faith, in the Markowitz family, it is the assimilated parents who are upset by their daughter Miriam's increasing religious observance. Ed Markowitz reflects that Miriam "has burst out of their household with its pleasant suburban Judaism and become a little refusenik" who brings paper plates on her visits home from medical school because her parents aren't scrupulous enough in keeping kosher.

Expectations are similarly subverted throughout the book. Rose Markowitz, the octogenarian matriarch, is interviewed by a PhD student who would lionize her as a brave refugee. Instead of being the exalted Survivor, though, Rose is a kvetching old woman, addicted to Percodan, who would just as soon forget her memories. At the Passover seder, while family members bicker about the interpretation of the ritual narrative, the grandson's Methodist girlfriend proves the most respectful attendee.

Goodman highlights the ironies of life in the contemporary Diaspora by placing her characters in alien settings. Rose, born in Germany, raised by a foster family in England, moves to Venice Beach. Henry, her Anglophile son, lives among Edwardian antiques in Oxford. Her other son Ed, a Middle East specialist who tends to side with the PLO, gets trapped at a Catholic retreat center in rural Minnesota. The grandchildren are scattered among a variety of elite colleges.

What sense of faith or family, the reader wonders, could be strong enough to bind these individuals? And yet the Markowitzes are inescapably, if not always happily, united.

Following the Markowitzes through three generations allows Goodman to pose tough questions about the meaning of family and religious ties in the midst of sweeping cultural change. For example, Rose Markowitz balks at Henry's marriage to a non-Jewish woman. But her reaction is no more or less heartfelt than Ed's disgruntlement at his own daughter Miriam's marriage to an Orthodox man. Just as Rose argues against Henry's being married by a Protestant minister, Ed is hurt by Miriam's shunning of mixed-sex dancing at her wedding. Counterposing these situations, Goodman investigates the endurance of identity, listening, as one character puts it, to "the thundering of history."

For all the complexities it addresses, Goodman's writing is never burdened with capital-T theme. She pulls the puppet strings with a light and unseen hand, writing with an assured grace that would make many older writers envious. She has a wonderful knack for the telling detail, describing characters with such economy that within a sentence or two we have them pegged. (We're introduced to Rose's stepdaughter Dorothy by learning that "she is forty-five and she sleeps and sleeps. . . . She wears jogging suits but she never goes jogging, and in the mornings she uses up all the hot water in her shower." What more do we need to know?)

The Family Markowitz will not change the face of contemporary literature, but that's not what it was meant to do. Allegra Goodman is not a risky young writer, but, perhaps more impressive, she is deeply insightful and accomplished one.