The Fiery Pantheon

In her latest comedy of manners, Lemann (Lives of the Saints) takes a modern-day Southern heroine and sends her out into the world laden with too many hoary ideas of Southern romance. The premise is much like that of an Edith Wharton novel, revolving around the on-again, off-again betrothal of 28-year-old Grace Stewart, the deliberately drab only daughter of the distinguished Stewart clan of New Orleans. Grace has renounced her law career in New York in order to marry the honorable Monroe Collier (one of several personages in her life she elevates to the ""Fiery Pantheon"" of her heroes) and assume the role of genteel matron in the land of her youth. Before the wedding, the Stewarts are to tour the world's ruined civilizations. But, on their stop at a rambling Richmond hotel, Grace meets Walter Sullivan, a young Wall Street securities analyst who is fascinated by great decaying empires but doesn't share Grace's need to romanticize them. To Mrs. Stewart, a thwarted psychologist who obsessively projects disintegration and turmoil, the mercurial and enthused Walter seems a nut case. To Grace, he's the opposite of courtly Monroe with his creaking ancestry and white suits. Who will make Grace happiest? Lemann's writing is by turns amusing and fatuous: she indulges too much in sarcastic generalities and hackneyed phrases (""This Walter character was a completely crazed individual""). There's a lot of filler in the narrative--Walter on airplanes, Walter visiting his dentist, his watchmaker, etc.--as though Lemann lost confidence in the ability of her genuinely appealing characters to carry the story, and that's too bad. (Mar.)