Southern Dissonance

WISE BLOOD (232 pp.) -- Flannery O'Connor--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

THE FAMILY (379 pp.)--Caroline Ivey --William Sloane ($3.50).

Seasons come, seasons go. but Southern novels just keep rolling along. Here are two new ones, both by women, and as different in subject and style as two books could be. Flannery O'Connor's arty Wise Blood flashes with fitful satire; Caroline Ivey's The Family gleams with kitchen coziness. One is too far from humanity, the other a bit too close to it.

The hero of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, a red-neck fanatic who plans to create "the Church Without Christ," is one of the most unlikely dullards ever to grumble through an American novel. The grandson of a fundamentalist preacher who was always harping on hell. Haze Motes feels that if he could abolish the idea of Jesus, there would be no need to worry about sin. Shouting from the hood of his dilapidated Essex, Motes proclaims that "there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall . . . Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar."

As he rasps out his gospel. Motes encounters a series of characters even more bizarre than himself. There is Sabbath Lily Hawks, an adolescent degenerate who takes Motes as a temporary lover. Sabbath's daddy, a fake blind man, is one of Motes's competitors in street preaching; another is Onnie Jay Holy, whose religious interest runs mainly to the collection plate. Motes's career comes to a gruesome end when he deliberately blinds himself because a mean-spirited cop has pushed his unlicensed Essex over a cliff.

Wise Blood commands attention for its oddness, and for its occasional passages of crisp writing and sly humor. But all too often it reads as if Kafka had been set to writing the continuity for L'il Abner.

By contrast, Caroline Ivey's The Family is reassuring in its pedestrian normality. Novelist Ivey has turned to that familiar Southern fixture, a genteel family going gracefully to seed. Into the Olmstead household comes a Northern son-in-law, brilliant, restless and unhappy. Though he loves his wife, he cannot fit into her family or persuade her to break away from it. Why should they always be kissing and hugging, reminiscing about adolescent trivia, delighting in the vast disorder of their house, and still honoring the obsolete cult of the Southern Lady? Most of The Family is a quarrel-by-quarrel account of a North-South marriage; the rest is a sympathetic picture of the gallant but slipping Olmsteads. As a study in regional contrasts, Author Ivey's book is persuasive; but it is too long and slow, and its main theme need not have been worried quite so much.

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