Southern Baroque : CALL AND RESPONSE <i> by T.R. Pearson (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 361 pp.) </i>

“Call and Response” reads like Faulkner on an acid trip. The sentences run into next week. If you find the verb, you’ve already forgotten the subject. Pearson indulges in a promiscuous introduction of characters; there are far too many in far too short a time. The reader might mix up the living with the dead, since the long departed and the recently departed inhabit both the text and the consciousness of the living.

Finding the plot of “Call and Response” is like finding the Holy Grail: You never do, but you fervently hope it exists. What you do find in reading this book are tangents spinning out, gaseous literary nebulae, so exotic that you read on for the splendor of it. Forget making any sense out of it.

There is a main character, of sorts, one Nestor Tudor, named after deceased Nestors, none of whom amounted to much; nor does the current Nestor Tudor, but he cuts his failure and loneliness with Ancient Age and Old Gold filter cigarettes as well as a passion for the entirely unsuitable Mary Alice Celestine Lefler.

Surrounding Nestor Tudor are Mrs. Phillip J. King, afflicted with suffering hormones, hot flashes and Mr. Phillip J. King. Another character, Tiny Aaron, seeks to kill a blacksnake in his closet, trying on his loafers, no doubt. A variety of women, young, middle-aged, widowed, whirl around the men in this small Southern town somewhere toward the North Carolina-Virginia border. The ladies are given to home organs, home Tonis and cement gnomes in the back yard.

One such lady, Mrs. Boatwright, blasts Nestor, Tiny and Mr. Dick Atwater with liquid fertilizer to stop a fight. The fact that Nestor and Tiny were boxing over two different women and that Dick Atwater jumped in so as not to be left out did not deter Mrs. Boatwright from her Christian duty to nonviolence. Besides, if she hadn’t broken up the fight how would she get the scoop?

The scoop on the town is best described by the moon climbing in the night sky, “. . . where it threw its paltry light down on the boulevard and the square and the rooftops roundabout with the people beneath them who slept soundly and the people beneath them who didn’t yet, the ones with cats to chastise and pitiful states to lament, the ones with ankles to elevate and ice packs to apply, the ones with almanacs to read and wives to berate them as they did it, the ones with women to admire them like they would if they possibly could admire themselves. . . .”

The delicious characters in this novel each individually reflect the dismal state of heterosexual communication. Honesty in relationships would surely take the fun out of them, so wives resort to throwing onions at husbands who comment that wives are enduring an edgy spell. Those seeking romance, such as one Mrs. May Sue Ludley, employ such catch phrases as “Kismet,” “Forces” and other quasi-mystical enticements to make the man of the moment feel fated to love her. If he doesn’t feel fated to love her, he will surely feel gas, for this novel is ripe with intestinal rumblings.

If bodies aren’t rumbling constantly, the churches are. The Methodist Church displays a propensity for flagrant divisiveness. There are black Methodists, each against the other. There are Bible thumpers and somewhat more refined Protestants. Yes, everyone is a Protestant. The town ritualistically purges any preacher who falls from Protestant grace, easy to do in the midst of such repression.

Does T. R. Pearson fall from grace with “Call and Response”? How can one cast stones at a writer brimming with such comic invention, such a flair for Southern dialogue? This reviewer cannot. A little discipline, however, would go a long way for Pearson, who should realize that even the most enchanted reader may tire as one convolution, one tangent follows another and another.