Scissors, Paper, Rock

Johnson follows Crossing the River with a wise and compassionate novel. Eleven episodes explore the history of the Hardin family of Strang Knob, Ky., a fading community hidden away in the Appalachians. At the thematic center is 36-year-old Raphael, youngest of the seven Hardin children, who, in the first episode, ``High Bridge,'' has come home from San Francisco to visit his dying father Tom and is himself dying of AIDS. This beautifully realized story paints an elegiac but unflinching portrait of a gay son's alienation from his harsh parent, even in the face of death. Other sections weave through time to flesh out complex family and community relationships, at the same time establishing the obsolescence of the Hardins' traditional ways. The philosophical voices of Raphael and Miss Camilla Perkins, a spinster schoolteacher who has spent decades on the periphery of the Hardin clan, shape this collage of family life and loss into an affecting whole, even though other narrators are not as striking. In the lesser pantheon of Hardin storytellers are Joe Ray, Raphael's alcoholic brother who learns to live with guilt after causing the car accident that injures his son; Elizabeth, the sister who fulfills her mother's dreams of moving to California, only to experience loneliness and failure; and Clark, the son meant to continue Tom's legacy in the community, but who dies in Vietnam. Johnson movingly conveys the senselessness of death, the inevitability of loss and the failure of families to shield us from either. (July)