Joy Baby

Ashour follows her promising debut, Speaking in Tongues , with this sprawling, semiautobiographical mishmash. A great-granddaughter of the founder of Phillips Petroleum, the author here traces the history of the Hanks of Lovely, Okla., a family of oil barons (or wildcats). Skipping back and forth in time, Ashour does best with the respectability-to-riches tale of Lavinia and Nelson Hanks, employing a headlong style that complements their meteoric rise at the turn of the century and their various idiosyncrasies. But her prose, like her story, is uneven, and her feckless contemporary heroine--Laydelle, granddaughter of Lavinia and Nelson--comes across as flat and unsympathetic, as do her parents, Mary and Hubbell. Only a few minor characters show much development and dimension: among these are Lavinia and Nelson's peer Zoe Simply, a schoolmarm turned madam; Hubbell's childhood hero, fellow military school student Tom Anderson; and Laydelle's 11th-hour knight in shining armor. At least half a dozen propitious stories remain submerged, making this effort rather less than the sum of its parts. (July)