THE HILLS AT HOME

That rare bird, a sparkling domestic comedy of manners, has alighted at the Hill home in a small community north of Boston, where various family members gather for shelter and succor during an unsettled period in their lives. Aging spinster Lily Hill, a stoic remnant of old Yankee stock, lives in the imposing but gently deteriorating Victorian house, and good manners prevent her from turning away the importunate visitors who settle into their ancestral manse and proceed to play out a farce of WASP gentility. The first arrival during the summer of 1989 is Lily's hearty brother, Harvey, widowed three times but still available and randy. Then Lily's histrionic, self-involved niece Ginger turns up with her teenaged daughter in tow, having decided to divorce her husband back in Kansas. Ginger's brother, Alden, fired from his Wall Street job, arrives next, with his earth-mother wife, Becky, and four children. Harvey's grandson, an aspiring stand-up comic, brings his girlfriend. Then nonrelatives start to pile up: a graduate student writing a thesis on WASP culture, a disgraced diplomat, a lovesick exchange student and other visitors bring complications and romance, culminating in a raid by the FBI. Debut novelist Clark observes this segment of New England gentry with an unsparing but affectionate eye. The spartan, tasteless meals; the leaking roof and inadequate furnace; the "four inches of warmish bath water, the 40-watt bulbs"; the frugal dispensation of financial resources; and a wedding where everyone "was dressed as if Talbot's had exploded" are brush strokes in a colorful and lively portrait of an eccentric family. Though the plot meanders in the middle section, Clark brings all the details together at the end, when even minor events are shown to have meaning and coalesce in a satisfying denouement. Warm and amusing, this novel has the old-fashioned virtue of good writing paired with a sprightly plot. (Feb. 18)

Forecast:Repeat readers are virtually guaranteed, since Clark is writing two sequels about the Hill clan at home and abroad.