Wisteria Never Forgets : THE FLOATPLANE NOTEBOOKS <i> by Clyde Edgerton (Algonquin Books: $16.95; 265 pp.) </i>

Good writers, like inventors of all sorts, can be notorious tinkerers, never quite satisfied with what others may regard as their best work. Of “The Sound and the Fury,” arguably his most accomplished novel, William Faulkner once said: “It’s the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try it again, though I’d probably fail again.”

Like Faulkner, North Carolina’s Clyde Edgerton has been unable to “leave alone” a novel that is plainly dear to his heart: While publishing the acclaimed “Raney” and “Walking Across Egypt,” he worked on “The Floatplane Notebooks” for 10 years, writing five drafts and attempting various narrative strategies. And like Faulkner, who unfolded much of the story of “The Sound and the Fury” from the point of view of an idiot, Edgerton has hit upon an unusual, if risky, idea: The narrator for sections of this whimsical, utterly original, ultimately brilliant novel of small-town North Carolina and Vietnam is none other than a wisteria vine.

As in his previous, more conventional novels, there are human narrators too. In fact, in what amounts to a democracy of perceptions, Edgerton tells the story of the Copeland clan from 1956 to 1971 from the perspective of almost all of its younger members as they grow up. Each of the voices is realistically earthy and idiosyncratic and advances the family saga: Meredith Copeland, a free spirit who throws a tombstone into a well, drives a truck into a lake and loses his limbs and ability to speak as a Marine in Vietnam; Thatcher Copeland, lacking his brother’s charisma but a rock of responsibility as a construction worker; their younger sister Noralee, an idealistic beauty who is drawn to black men and becomes what the family accusingly calls a “hippie”; their womanizing cousin Mark, an Air Force pilot in Vietnam; and Bliss, who marries Thatcher and sees the family’s foibles with clear and poignant eyes.

But it’s an ancient, overgrown wisteria vine near the family cemetery that tells the story of the family’s earlier members, of births and deaths and tragic events such as the lynching of a black man after the Civil War, adding perspective to the latter-day Copelands as they return each year to “clean the graves” in one of the many rituals--exotic to non-Southerners--that bind the family together.

The vine is a device--it solves Edgerton’s technical problem of how to relate the deep past of the family--but it is also a spellbinding storyteller, recalling how it was planted when the family had slaves to help, how babies were born or died and how, every blue moon, the dead can be seen and heard, talking about their fate and arguing about events in family history.

Deriving naturally from character, Edgerton’s comedy is as deft as his narrative is inventive. At the center of all the fun are the eccentric family patriarch, Albert Copeland, and the floatplane he buys and then tries for 15 years to get airborne. Though the plane is missing some parts and Albert has minimal training as a pilot, he keeps the faith by conducting periodic “tests” on a lake and logging hilariously inaccurate reports. “First successful in-air operation today,” he notes. “Aircraft lifted into air on eight separate occasions.” As son Thatcher notes dryly, what in fact occurred was that Albert drove the plane “across this speed boat wake twice and it bounced eight times.”

In North Carolina, where he teaches part time at St. Andrews Presbyterian College, Edgerton is known as something of an entertainer, spicing readings from his novels with comic asides and banjo picking. (A musician as well, he recently made an album, on Flying Fish records.) And, particularly as in “Raney,” with its comic depiction of colliding cultures, there is plenty of entertainment in “The Floatplane Notebooks.”

But a reader senses here a depth of feeling and a hard edge that mark a new departure in Edgerton’s work. Edgerton was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam in 1970-71, and the last third of the book, in which Meredith and Mark go off to war (like their Confederate forebears, naively thinking the conflict will end quickly), is among the wisest, most heartfelt writing to emerge from the South in our generation. Though Edgerton misses a few beats--Mark’s lyricism as a pilot may at times be more the author’s--Meredith Copeland’s first-person account of his Vietnam experience, homecoming and physical paralysis in North Carolina is breathtakingly stark, full and real.

At the end, in 1971, as Meredith’s father, Albert, tries to get his son aloft in the floatplane (after 15 years, the damn thing still hasn’t gotten off the lake), a reader can bet on experiencing a rush of goose bumps, a real test of whether fiction is flying. Edgerton leaves his final moment tantalizingly open-ended, but the story he couldn’t “leave alone,” that he seems to have been born to tell, is--to paraphrase Faulkner--told right.