Something for the Trade

STEAMBOAT GOTHIC (562 pp.)--Frances Parkinson Keyes--Messner ($3.75).

Frances Parkinson Keyes (rhymes with eyes) insists that she doesn't really know how to write a bestseller and doesn't much aspire to learn; she likes to think of herself as "a woman of letters." Her readers, who buy her books by the million, find her disavowals hard to believe. So do booksellers; to them, Author Keyes is simply one of the blessings of the trade.

The latest Keyes novel, Steamboat Gothic, will not let anyone down. The style is reliably ponderous, the dialogue stilted and sometimes all but interminable. Steamboat has other tried & tested ingredients. It covers a good long stretch of time (1869-1930) following the fortunes of the Batchelor family on a plantation in Louisiana. Author Keyes knows her Louisiana, proves it with a foreword on sources, a bibliography of steamboating, and all her usual period impedimenta: details of dress, descriptions of houses and plantations. And there is enough clatter about wills, heirs and taxes to bemuse an expert on the Napoleonic Code.

Clyde Batchelor had impressive good looks, plenty of money and a good heart, but what he wanted most was respectability. When he came a-wooing Lucy, a lovely Richmond widow, he did not dare tell her that he had started life in an orphanage, that he had become a riverboat gambler and made a fortune in supply deals with the Union Army during the Civil War. But Lucy knew goodness when she saw it, and went off with him to Louisiana to live at Cindy Lou, a plantation Clyde had coveted when he passed it on the river. When he made the deal to buy it, he had also seduced the widow who owned it, but if ever a man reformed for good, it was Clyde. He was not only a model husband but a shrewd businessman. Of course, stepson Bushrod turned out to be a caddish sponger, but stepdaughter Gary was the joy of Clyde's heart. Lucy was loving, but she could not give Clyde a child of his own.

Steamboat smiles and worries through three generations of Batchelor loves & sorrows, business ups & downs. By the time grandson Larry gets Cindy Lou, both Steamboat Gothic architecture and Steamboat Gothic ideas are beginning to crumble. The mistress of Cindy Lou is now Louise, whom Larry brought back from France after World War I. They already have a son and two daughters who could quite easily touch off a sequel. The fresh scene has already been set: oil is struck on Cindy Lou, and the old gothic pile itself has been turned into the Clyde Batchelor Community Center.

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