Mother of Pearl

Although this tale about a family acting out its nuttiness winds down before it ends, good humor and the author's respect for his characters prevail. Widowed grandmother Pearl moved back home to East Texas, to live with sister Wanda Gay. They bicker continually about where to plant new rose bushes, whether their mother was devil or saint, how to raise children, what to wear. Swift reveals, through flashbacks and the women's natterings, how people bear the overwhelming weight of an inherited past: their grandmother, who responded to her husband's affair with their mulatto housekeeper by becoming outrageously crazy; their mother, who, wanting above all to appear normal, learned to detest men, to play the piano and finally to ape her mother's flambuoyant death. Though some of this seems contrived, Pearl, who favors her father, an iconoclastic auto mechanic, partly escapes and partly is bound to her heritage in this mostly genial, slightly frayed, story from the author of The Christopher Park Regulars. (June)