Odd Cousin, Far Removed

By Martha Duffy

All Tennessee is divided into three parts. To the ordinary historian, they are eastern, middle and western. But that misses all the savor. As Nathan Longfort identifies them, the subdivisions are the Lost State of Franklin, the area in the eastern part of the state that was once part of North Carolina; Miro, once governed by Spaniards, in the center; and the Purchase, farther west. Similar distinctions apply to families. On his mother's side, Longfort is a Virginia- Tennessean, on his father's, a Carolina-Tennessean. You can tell the difference by whether a person refers to a cabinet as a "cupboard" or a "press."

In the Tennessee Country (Knopf; 226 pages; $21) by Peter Taylor, the writer of shrewd, laconic short stories whose previous novel won the Pulitzer Prize, revels in such delineations. He writes of a society grounded in family and memory of the Civil War. Nathan's father was named for Confederate general Braxton Bragg, and many years later he gives his own youngest boy the same name. Trudie, Nathan's mother, was the youngest of the three buoyant, beautiful Tucker sisters, all widowed early, who dominate the hero's childhood and the first half of this funny, rueful novel of morals and manners. The other figure who keeps recurring and who comes to obsess Nathan is the women's brooding "outside" -- or illegitimate -- cousin, Aubrey Bradshaw.

Eventually, Nathan finds out that as a teenager his mother was in love with Aubrey; in fact he paid court to all three girls. Nathan first becomes aware of him, though, during a train trip carrying the body of Nathan's grandfather, a U.S. Senator, from Washington to Knoxville. Aubrey was not welcome aboard, and the Tucker sisters, now young matrons, are particularly appalled by his efforts to join the funeral party. The journey is one of Taylor's best comic set pieces, a deadpan account of how the drunken antics of the male mourners caused a series of unseemly disasters.

After that, Aubrey simply disappears, though Nathan believes he sometimes sees him, usually at funerals. The rest of In the Tennessee Country follows Nathan's adult life. Though Trudie wanted him to become an artist, he settles for being an art historian, and Taylor makes an elegant sketch of the bramble of academic politics. On his retirement, Nathan becomes preoccupied with Aubrey to the degree that his son Brax, who really is a painter, becomes bored and annoyed. It is Brax who finds Aubrey, now a dying ancient, and Brax who chooses finally to follow his path and live far away, independent of his family.

One can admire Taylor for the sublime tact of his writing; no one's behavior, however bizarre, causes a ripple in Nathan's gentle but exacting account. The problem lies with Aubrey. He repudiates the Tuckers and the hypocrisy that kept him a true outsider. "Compromise," he intones. "That's their rule of life." And he blames Nathan for being "part of the world he was born into."

Taylor seems to agree, but the evidence elsewhere is that Nathan lacked the talent to be an artist and that he has dealt honestly with his own work and his family. And it is disappointing not to learn what Aubrey did all those years during his disappearance except gnaw at old wounds. It seems a vague, washy ending for a work that glories in the charm of specificity.