My Brother Michael

In a first novel that oozes Southern authenticity like honey over a hot biscuit, Gabriel Catts, a Civil War historian and academic raised in a small north Florida mill town, tells the turbulent story of his unquenchable love for his brother's wife. The son of a poor day laborer and a strict though loving Baptist mother, young Gabriel falls in love with Myra, the girl next door, whose father is savagely abusive. No sooner is Gabriel attracted, however, than Myra leaves to live with relatives in Alabama. Nearly a decade later, Gabriel, visiting home from college, finds that Myra has returned to town and has married his own brother, Michael. Heartbroken but resigned, Gabriel leaves for graduate school up north. Years later, he comes back once more and is invited to live with his brother, who has become an absent super-provider, working endless hours at the mill to buy a pretty house for his wife and to back his brother's intellectual dreams. Ostensibly writing a book but unable to suppress his love for Myra, who, unbeknownst to him, has been diagnosed as schizophrenic and put on lithium, Gabriel plunges into an affair with her and tries to convince her to marry him. Myra's pregnancy precipitates Gabriel's exile for another decade. After his brother dies at 43 and Gabriel weathers another heartrending reunion with Myra, their love child and his family, he sits down to grapple with his life story. Though Owen's fraternal melodrama can't avoid sentimentality, her fine writing and the ring of her natural voice will carry readers along like a tale told on a porch on a sultry Southern night. (Mar.)