Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky

In her first novel, Oliver's graceful writing and unerring social observations transform a soap-operatic plot into a quietly compelling story of a young woman's awakening. Along the Alabama Black Belt of 1938, the twin plagues of the Depression and the boll weevil are ravaging cotton farms and undermining age-old boundaries of class, race and sex. Oliver (the short-story collection Seventeen Times as High as the Moon) encapsulates a world of social upheaval in the story of 20-year-old Callie Tatum, whose husband, Russell, has been forced to leave the cotton fields his family has farmed ``since the Indians'' to work in a textile mill. Alone on the large farm with her baby and disabled father-in-law, the lonely, vaguely unhappy Callie begins an affair with Clifton Wade, a Birmingham insurance man. The affair, which brings tragedy into the lives of both Callie and Clifton, is not well developed, however. Oliver's interest and strength clearly lie not in plot mechanics but in her knowledge of Callie's world and her ability to depict the evolution of characters within a highly constricted social milieu. The result is a richly detailed story short on suspense but full of subtle surprises. QPB alternate; paperback to Dutton/Plume. (Sept.)