BOOK REVIEW : Southern Writer Goes In Search of Connections to Her Heritage : THE PICTURE MAKERS: <i> by Emily Ellison</i> , William Morrow $18.95, 252 pages

You get to know the Glass family gradually, as if you’d moved down South and been introduced first to Eleanor--perhaps at a gallery opening in Atlanta, where she’s living when the book opens. Eleanor is a painter, happily but uneasily married to her second husband, Will Turner, whose brisk, straight-ahead manner contrasts strikingly with the more complex personalities of his in-laws. Will arranges Southern tours for performing artists, and in that business, a Yankee outlook can be an asset. One by one, you meet the rest of Eleanor’s folks: her parents,Henry and Coraruth Glass; her former mother-in-law, Fitz Ballard, who continues to be her confidante and friend, and finally, Will Turner’s kid sister, Marilyn, who is still trying to resolve some 10-year-old anxieties.

There’s also Ben Bolt, an oddball bachelor with a name from a plaintive English ballad, once Henry Glass’s foreman at the peach cannery but now supporting himself with a shoe-shine stand in one of Atlanta’s new office towers. Eleanor’s brother, Lucas, is a sensitive, hard-working physician, remote both physically and emotionally from the rest. That’s the entire cast, just the way you’d find them if Eleanor asked you to keep her company on the drive up the interstate to South Carolina on one of her frequent trips back home.

On the road, you’d hear about Eleanor’s childhood, and how she adored her father, trailing him everywhere, climbing the peach trees, then waiting patiently in the steaming cannery for him to check on the progress of the harvest. She’d play under the conveyor belts, listening to the Appalachian migrant workers talk while water from the washing vats dripped on her head and damp leaves stuck to her skin. “They’d stand there for hours--their hands swollen and wrinkled from the water and the fuzzy peach skin--until the lunch horn blew and the belt rattled and banged to a stop,” when they’d break for a lunch of dry cheese, biscuits and sausage.

By the time she was 9, Eleanor could run the water wheel that moved the fruit along, and long before she could legally drive, she was taking the truck out into the orchards with water for the pickers . . . all of it fine training for an artist. Formed by that background, she still drives north often, haunted by the feeling that she’s needed on the farm, only to find that an essential connection has frayed and disintegrated. “Something is gone there that once was, something that no amount of money or accomplishment or physical pleasure or other children can ever replace.”

Finding that elusive something is the subject of “The Picture Makers,” and Ellison gives each of her major characters a chance to assist in the search. We hear from them in turn, at different times and in entirely distinct voices, and in the process we see how changes in society have impinged upon their lives and altered their attitudes. From Coraruth we learn that there was a middle child killed in an auto accident--an incident that forever unbalanced the family relationships. In her breezy, outspoken way, Fitz Ballard emerges as a true original, a woman who has rejected the bland life of a Southern widow to become a crusading ecologist in late middle age, eventually embarking upon a romance that flouts convention to the utmost. Listening to Henry Glass reminisce about the recent past, we understand Eleanor’s growing concern for her parents. Ben Bolt is heard from in a shorter segment, struggling to explain his abrupt and mysterious departure from the Glass farm, an event more pivotal that it seemed at the time.

With virtually no redundancy, each person’s version of incidents augments and enhances the one that has gone before, until Eleanor, the artist and leading voice, succeeds in creating order and continuity from the shards of Glass history. To do that, she temporarily puts a thousand miles between herself and her family, an experiment that succeeds equally well for the artist as writer and the writer as artist.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Sister Hollywood” by C.K. Stead (St. Martin’s Press).