In the Tennessee Country

The voice of Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Taylor ( A Summons to Memphis ) is a quiet one, telling tales in which much of the drama lies not in plot but rather in his watchfully observed Southern characters. The narrator of his new novel, which is scaled like an extended novella, is an elderly and successful art historian, Nathan Longforth, who recalls incidents from his Tennessee childhood and how they influenced his later life. He tells of a distant cousin, the illegitimate Aubrey Tucker Bradshaw, who had once briefly courted his mother and then disappeared (as did many ill-fitting men of that time and place), only to reappear mysteriously from time to time at family funerals. Nathan, who sometimes despairs at his lack of creativity and rejoices in signs of it in his artist son, becomes obsessed with Aubrey's memory and tries to find him. How he does so, and what the discovery reveals to him, is the essence of the novel. Taylor writes in a graciously old-fashioned manner, and the regional family intertwinings of the early years of the century are convincingly set forth. But his book, apart from occasional poignant moments like the death of Nathan's mother, is an oddly bloodless and meandering affair, with little of the life of its award-winning forebear. (Aug.)