Chesapeake Song

The mingled pain and joy of family life and the bonds between generations are the subjects of a leisurely narrative that is overwritten and diffuse at times, but rewards patient readers with moving insights. First-novelist Richardson begins her story in 1990, then interweaves episodes from the previous four decades as she considers the troubled marriage of Charles and Tamra Lane, as well as the lives of Tamra's parents, Seth and Virginia Wells. Seth is the principal of a black high school in Nanticoke, Maryland; another black family, the wealthy Lanes, own an 800-acre farm nearby. Charles and Tamra fall in love in college, but each has family issues to resolve. She bears emotional scars inflicted by her father's alcoholism and is determined to escape by becoming a geneticist and studying abroad; he dreams of building the Lane farm into an agricultural industrial complex. After a long courtship, they marry, and Tamra gives up her job as a laboratory researcher soon after she gives birth to twins. As Charles devotes more and more time to managing his land, relations between them become strained. She finally leaves with their children, an act that echoes her mother's actions 26 years earlier. Though it sometimes veers close to bathos, this thoughtful story offers forthright background detail about race relations while it illuminates the havoc caused by recurrent patterns of destructive behavior. (Nov.)