The Track of Real Desires

``Traditionally, the way to get by in the Delta was to drink hard and hold on to your eccentricities,'' comments one character in Lowry's haunting new novel. The residents of Eunola, Miss., are jolted from their daily coping mechanisms by the return home of Leland Standard, who had ``escaped'' 30 years earlier, and is now back with her illegitimate 19-year-old son, whose paternity she has never revealed, and yet another secret. In the course of one day and night, eight of Leland's former friends gossip about her and then gather at a dinner party in her honor, which turns into a debacle, ending with two acts of sexual union and one death. Lowry brings us into the interior lives of her sometimes foolish, tacky or pretentious characters to reveal the vulnerability, fear and tenuous hope that governs their existences. These people do drugs to stop their emotional pain, sleep around out of boredom or renounce sex to erase bad memories. With the exception of Leland's son and her best friend's child, all are over 50 and still searching for direction and meaning, wondering how they had strayed so far from ``the track of real desires.'' Meanwhile, their town has turned into a paradigm of an economically depressed community where businesses and farms are failing, where civil rights has changed demographics but not inherent racism, and old values are dying. Lowry's ( Breaking Gentle and the nonfiction Crossing Over ) witty asides keep the narrative airborne, and her affection for her motley characters renders them credible. But nearly every one of them is eccentric in some way, and readers may grow impatient with such a surfeit of bizarre behavior, no matter how adept the author is at portraying it. (Apr.)