Rich in Love/A Southern Family:

...Clare, a forty-two-year-old New York writer who' 'escaped her southern upbringing)" returns home to celebrate her mother Lily's birthday...

...Lucille discovers a matter-of-fact note written by Helen stating that she plans to begin a new life and is leaving husband Warren, a businessman who has done well for himself but has not been exciting enough for adventuresome Helen...

...In both novels, routine family existence is shattered by an unexpected family tragedy that holds up a mirror to the realities underlying otherwise "perfect" family dynamics...

...And as an old theater person, I have to tell you it's not boring...

...The attempts feel contrived and don't work...

...What action does take place over the course of the year in the novel is dwarfed by episodic digressions that are picked up and dropped...

...Both novelists pit uniformly-spirited women against ineffective, overly-sensitive men who are dependent on mother figures to come through for them when their own women don't deliver...

...Clare's half-brothers: Theo, a twenty-eight-year-old under-achiever whose distinction stems from his defiance of family expectations, having married a hillbilly, Snow Mullins, and fathered a son, Jason, before the two separated...

...All of the family dynamics are drawn in this oppressive family gathering: Lily, a spirited woman, whose life has disintegrated because she has married beneath her, and is now reduced to bitter southern affectations...

...It had been accumulating silently over the years like equity in a house...

...Thus begins a series of family regroupings - in which Lucille assumes the role of head-of-the-household while she observes (in exasperation) family members reshuffling into place and embarking on their own "growing pains" journey: Dad finds a new companion in hairstylist Vera, Rae struggles with the loss of freedom in marriage and pregnancy, and Bill tries to' 'truly win'' his new wife for the first time...

...Granted, Humphreys's characters are more appealing: we're bound to prefer lively, idiosyncratic characters whose generous natures give us faith that they will overcome adverse circumstance...

...In her effort to be comprehensive, Godwin also crams in commentary on religion, social class, race - even the role of the artist - which she can't possibly do justice to in any meaningful way...

...One also wonders if any strong men exist in the South...

...Godwin's characters, in contrast, are self-conscious, narcissistic babblers whose feeble attempts at action are constantly undermined by self-pity...

...Family endures...

...Godwin, in contrast, has written a sprawling series of rambling journals in which a bloated cast of secondary characters (conveniently representing every geographic, ethnic, and racial heritage) comes and goes and whose purpose appears strictly conventional: they allow family members to speak...

...But it's more than a case of likable characters and seductive narrative...

...We are moved along in this reverie until a second family crisis - Rae's violent labor and delivery - regroups the family yet again...

...Helen, who has been hiding out nearby, comes home...

...Of course, Lucille manages to fly, in / knew what love was without the aid of empirical evidence, and furthermore, I believed that I did have it...

...Lucille's fundamentally "good" character, reflected in the clever observations she makes about life around her, constitutes the heart of the novel...

...He is completing a book tentatively titled The Economics of Chaos: the Politics of Boom...

...But that was in a language so far back that all its words are gone, a language we can only imagine.'' Godwin's Felix remarks to lover Clare, "It's like being inside a drama in which good influences and bad influences are being played out through the family members...

...Josephine Humphreys Rich in Love the form of her first feelings of love...

...From there, however, the novels part company...

...Indeed, Lucille's initiation story is powerful because we are drawn into the subjectivity of her perspective - we are as shocked as Lucille is by Bill's rejection-and are forced to go back and rethink her perspective on her family's own individual journeys...

...We simply get lost in the bulk of it all - but worse, we get bored and resent it - all 540 pages of it...

...it is a drift that people cannot seem to help, in spite of lessons learned the hard way . . . 'Family' meant people in a house together...

...Humphreys has crafted a very tight novel: every character has a purpose...

...One has the sense that these writers feel compelled to make their personal statements known through the racial presence in their characters' lives...

...Suzanne Rowen Two southern women writers-Humphreys with her second novel and Godwin with her seventh-offer very different perspectives on the plight of the southern family...

...Set in North Carolina, Godwin also devises a family tragedy to interrupt the natural flow of daily family life - this time, a matriarchal, genteel southern family, the Quicks...

...And that's a value for both of us, isn't it...

...You feel charmed, vulnerable, and eager for her to stretch her wings and take off...

...Clare's homecoming is interrupted by the untimely and mysterious death of Theo and his new girlfriend - a conjectured murder-suicide...

...SUZANNE ROWEN 15 afree-lance writer living in New York City...

...Like Humphreys's novel, Godwin's is a study in observation: narrators witness, reflect, and articulate thoughts and feelings about what they discover while they watch the family forced to change by circumstance...

...Godwin's family muddles, drowning the reader in the resistance of the old South, the South that was better left right where it was...

...Lucille immediately takes charge, softening the news in a revised letter, calling her older sister Rae back from Washington, and diverting a "frozen" Warren with TVs, exercycles, and computer games...

...I'll bank on Humphreys any day.ll bank on Humphreys any day...

...JEFFREY BURTON RUSSELL is professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of a three-volume study of the devil in Western history...

...Rae recovers, and decides she'll keep Bill...

...MICHAEL GALLAGHER is the author of The Laws of Heaven (Weiden & Nicolson), a book on American Catholic resistance to immoral public policy.family...

...Humphreys's Lucille concludes "Our family is not what it was, but we are all gravitating back into family lives of one sort and another...

...Lily's second husband, Ralph Quick, an ineffective, lonely put-terer, who is ill-equipped to handle the likes of Lily...

...But Humphreys's family grows, making you believe that the South is indeed the new South, the South that has risen again...

...It is, in fact, when both novelists launch into indigenous social critique that the novels fall short...

...Faithful to southern literary tradition, these writers study the impact of time, place, and family in the shaping of individual souls, focusing on the struggle of the individual to shape his/her own identity and destiny in the face of very powerful historical, contextual, and familial ties and pressures...

...If the weight of this fiasco is not enough, sister Rae returns home pregnant, with husband Bill (whom she has just married on the ride down), and ready to move in for the summer...

...technically the novels cannot compete...

...We're never seduced by Godwin's characters or their rhetoric, and thus caught unawares when subjective accounts of events are contradicted by the perspectives of others...

...In the end, what does this say about REVIEWERS Eliot janeway is the publisher of the Jane-way Letter...

...But Lucille's silent affections are not directed at her appealing boyfriend, Wayne, but at her brother-in-law, Bill...

...and Lucille, who has openly confessed her love, emerges from rejection, a matured, self-aware woman poised for greater heights...

...I'm never able to put my finger on who starts the trouble...

...every observation folds into a later discovery...

...and twenty-six-year-old Rafe, good-looking and self-destructive...

...It was in me...

...Interior monologues (especially Clare's) go on forever, and go nowhere...

...Humphreys's story, set in South Carolina, is narrated by a precocious, witty, and utterly charming seventeen-year-old, Lucille Odom, whose course of adolescent development is abruptly accelerated by the chaos caused by her mother Helen's disappearance...

...THE SOUTH RISES & FALLS RICH IN LOVE Josephine Humphreys Viking, $16.95, 261 pp...

...That event offers individual members a choice: to stretch themselves and emerge as independent adults or to succumb again to the temptations of the very familial interaction that "has kept them down...

...The tragedy unleashes a series of narrator accounts of individuals grappling with Theo's death: each tries to reconcile this event with >his/her own personal history, overcome perceived family betrayals, and determine his/her own purpose in life outside family walls...

...every action intentionally shapes the outcome of characters...