The Generic Ineffability of Southern Sex : VELOCITY <i> by Kristin McCloy (Random House: $16.95; 256 pp.) </i>

Imagine a novel set in an unnamed place in California where you can’t tell from the dialogue, the descriptions of physical features, or the cultural particularity of the characters whether you’re in Lone Pine, Van Nuys or Fresno. In “Velocity,” Random House has seen fit to publish a first novel by New Yorker Kristin McCloy that takes us, like a car with fogged-up windows, into Anywhere, North Carolina, apparently a small town (yet with tobacco factories and a gay disco) where waitresses are lovelorn, tough-talking and golden-hearted, cops are laconic and brooding, and that steamy summer heat, the inevitable backdrop of Southern melodrama, cooks up the same old brew of reckless sexuality, humid menace hovering like a thunderhead, and--you guessed it, boys--a heap of trouble.

Maybe a sense of place doesn’t matter anymore; not only has it become hip to speak of the new, homogenized America, but there’s an unspoken conviction among many writers these days that the more generic a place appears, the more profound and universal its alchemy into fiction. And maybe all these cliches about the South would be less galling if the novel had lesser literary pretentions, or if its lead character, 25-year-old Ellie Lowell, a hypersensitive theater director, hadn’t been reared in the same small town before moving to New York City, and ought to know her old home intimately, ought to be psychically connected to it in all its shadings.

Oh well; as that master of Southern particularity, Eudora Welty, might say, such earthbound complaints are probably a losing battle. “Velocity,” with its racy title and its seductive central theme of the nexus between grief and dangerous sexual obsession, is undoubtedly heady stuff in the New York publishing world, a solipsistic novel where North Carolina--an “in” spot these days for fictional stories--could easily be interchanged with North Dakota. Despite the ambitious theme, what matters here is not the layered reality of characters interacting in a specific place, but sexual fantasy and narcissistic sensation, both of which are brought off--like vintage MTV--with a certain breathless style and verve.

When her mother dies in a car wreck, Ellis Lowell suspends boyfriend and career back in the Big Apple and spends that familiar long, hot summer with her father, a cop, and her forbidden new lover, Jesse, a pill-popping half-Cherokee who drives a Harley like a bat out of hell, hangs out with Hell’s Angels and makes love with such torrid, above-the-earth perfection that McCloy’s many sex scenes may set a new standard for Manhattan daydreams: “Hearing you groan to consciousness, feeling an arm, thick as my thigh, reaching to encircle me, pull me on top, you were like waking to a cannibal, your eyes brilliant with lawlessness, like an animal, insatiable and healthy, overcome with hunger first thing in the morning, not like the boys I’d known who needed to rise and pee, to make coffee and brush their teeth. . . . I can’t describe the pleasure it gave me, how willingly I was taken, or how contagious that hunger was, how it filled me with the need to live, with an urgency to stay alive!”

Were McCloy unabashedly purveying sexual fantasy, such idealized passages might just wash; sex between Ellie and Jesse, always at the same fevered pitch, always ineffably orgasmic and free of mundane distractions, might make us happily forget the unpredictable range of sexual experience with any lover.

But the headlong sex in this novel is meant to be organically, almost mystically linked to grief--to the loss of Ellie’s mother and Ellie’s struggle to go on living. It’s a fascinating idea, always has been; but with McCloy, the same disregard for realism--in a broad sense, the absence of place--she brings to sex she also brings to her theme and characters. A cop’s daughter reared in a small North Carolina town, no matter how “New York” she’s become, would be savvier in the town’s ways, and have denser, more ironic, more contradictory feelings about her affair with an outcast. Outside of the always self-referential cloud of Ellie’s perceptions, we don’t know the mother well enough to share Ellie’s grief, to understand why that grief is powerful enough to drive her desperately into the arms of an uncommunicative (except, suddenly, in bed), often hostile half-Cherokee. Alive or dead, her mother exists for Ellie’s needs, with meaningless lip service paid to what she means to Ellie’s father. Like her father, like her lover, like the waitress Ellie works with at a local restaurant, her mother is generic, undifferentiated, without a memorably specific life of her own.

What ultimately happens in “Velocity” is too predictable to spell out; the book, now relying for its effects almost entirely on melodrama, simply collapses toward the end in a puddle of sentimentality. It’s a shame, because McCloy, like a strobe light, does beam out flashes of talent. Some offbeat scenes suggest that she may hit something grand when she works closer to the vein of her own experience. It’s a shame, too, because there are those who insist that this kind of writing has its cake and eats it too--it sells, and it’s transcendent stuff. They’re right on the former; on the latter, they’d be closer to the truth if this novel were closer to the Earth.