Polite Forms of Aggression A SOUTHERN FAMILY

By Paul Gray

Clare Campion, 42, a successful novelist living in New York City, pays one of her infrequent visits home to Mountain City in western North Carolina. There she finds her mother Lily, her stepfather Ralph Quick and her two half brothers, Theo, 28, and Rafe, 26, all of them behaving incorrigibly in character and thereby reminding Clare of why she had left them and the South in the first place. Her only respite from what she calls "the ongoing theatricals of the family" is the companionship of her childhood friend Julia Richardson. Years earlier, Julia gave up a promising career as a historian and returned to Mountain City to teach in the local college, take care of her dying mother and then look after her father. These two women manifest the attraction of opposites. Clare has apparently broken free of her past and asserted her talent in the world at large; Julia has surrendered her future to duty. Each regards the other as a path not taken.

All the elements seem to have been assembled for a spirited feminist parable about the oppressive choices that society forces on women. Indeed, that story can be found within A Southern Family, but so can many others. In her seventh novel, Gail Godwin again displays the narrative verve and generosity that won critical praise for her early works and then popular, best-selling acclaim for A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) and The Finishing School (1985). Her meticulously controlled fiction creates the illusion of life unpredictably unfolding and of characters trying to make moral sense out of experiences that overwhelm thought.

Hence Clare's discomfiture over her latest trip home is suddenly dwarfed by tragedy: Theo, whose wife has left him with custody of their young son, goes off one Sunday afternoon to see his current girlfriend, a nurse who is trying to disentangle herself from their affair. Within hours, both are dead of gunshot wounds, apparently administered by Theo in a murder-suicide. This event throws the members of the Quick family, their friends and the close-knit society of Mountain City into paroxysms of confusion and self-reproach. What made Theo do it? Could he have been saved, and, if so, who failed him?

As each character looks back at Theo and searches for clues to explain his fate, a complex portrait slowly emerges, not only of a troubled young man but of an entire community losing its ideals and energies. Theo's marriage to Snow Mullins, a red-neck girl with a ninth-grade education, was a gauntlet thrown down at the Quicks' precarious sense of stature, indeed at Mountain City's communal illusion of social propriety. Theo's younger brother Rafe remembers, "I mean, it was embarrassing at the wedding, seeing how Mom's friends tried to keep their faces from showing how horrified they were when the bride's side of the church started filling up."

Theo's father Ralph cannot share in this outrage because he is not entitled to it by birth: "If social class could be measured on a ruler -- and lots of people sure as hell acted as if it could -- he would estimate that both he and Snow had married up about four inches, he going from about the five- to the nine-inch measure on a ruler, Snow from about the three- to the seven-inch one; he figured he had brought Lily and their children back down to a seven." Lily thinks so too, and her resentment is an important factor in the simmering deterioration of their marriage. One character recalls Theo's comment on the elaborate manners of his fellow Southerners: "Their politeness is a very effective form of aggression."

Along with her grief and guilt at not having paid more attention to a half brother 14 years her junior, Clare is haunted by something Theo said to her the day before his death: "I was thinking how nice it would be to be a character in one of your novels." Assuming that she was about to be flattered, she had asked him why. His reply: "Because you take care of them so nicely. You let them suffer a little, just enough to improve their characters, but you always rescue them from the abyss at the last minute and reward them with love or money or the perfect job -- or sometimes all three."

| A daring irony is at work here, for the same thing could be said about some of Godwin's novels, especially A Mother and Two Daughters. As a stand-in for her creator, Clare must wrestle with the question of whether all fiction, including A Southern Family, necessarily lies about reality by giving it the coherence of beginnings, middles and ends. Furthermore, before Theo's death, Clare had been working on a novel that would signal a breakthrough in her career, one that "was going to get beyond family life and the South and independent youngish women wriggling out of the deadly twin-embrace." Instead of finishing that book, she is forced to live through the old stories all over again.

Clare's predicament can be read as Godwin's veiled explanation for returning to the same themes and materials she has worked on so thoroughly in the past. If so, the gesture is considerate but unnecessary. Born in the South, Godwin appears to be one of those writers who inherited a subject for life; then she developed the wisdom and talent to make her birthright seem constantly fresh and enthralling.