BOOK REVIEW : Sad, Sad Town Gives Tears the Brushoff : METEORS IN AUGUST<i> by Melanie Rae Thon</i> Random House $18.95, 274 pages

During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, life in the small town of Willis, Mont., plays itself out.

Willis encompasses a universe: The nature that surrounds it is by terms lovely and brutal--and it isn’t anything as expected or banal as snow that snatches life away, but a seductive and lovely lake, which mirrors an uncaring sky, or fire that blazes up to snatch the unruly sinner.

There is a lumber mill in Willis. Men squander their lives slicing down wood, losing a finger or a fist, their dispositions eroding over time.

The women look at futures of shoring, child-bearing, or slinging hash down at the truck stop. The only way “out” of this cheerless prospect seems to be “up.”

Lizzie Macon--a quiet little sister of 9 when we first see her, a gangling kid of 14 during the middle of the book, and an almost grown adolescent by the end--can see just one way out. It has to be God who holds the key, who offers the comfort, who deals out the solace to make this existence bearable.

Lizzie’s own world divides into several parts. There is the town itself; the Lutheran Church and the Last Chance Bar, and then the truck stop. And out beyond the town boundaries, a pitiful community of two-room shacks where Indian transients live until poverty and prejudice drive them back to the reservation.

Lizzie’s own family is a component of the “white” world. Her mother is care-worn and arthritic and has resentfully given her life to others. Her father is a racist brute. Her beautiful older sister, Nina, soon runs off with a half-breed, Billy Elk, son of a white trash outcast and a splendidly impressive father, Red Elk, whom Lizzie’s father has been trying to murder for a long time.

Trying to break away from her family, and that Lutheran Church, and the horrid lynch parties, Lizzie falls in with an itinerant woman evangelist who holds clandestine Christian services in her own living room. At these scary soirees, Lizzie meets a sample of other townsfolk who crave salvation and escape: the bartender who has committed adultery, a flasher who still lives at home with his mother, a reformed prostitute, and so on.

The beautiful Nina has to leave because she gets pregnant and her father refuses to let her stay at home. As much as the inhabitants of Willis are bewitched by their fruitless quests for an astonishingly indifferent Divine Being, they are beleaguered on Earth by sexual longings and the inevitable punishment for having these longings. Lizzie, helplessly attracted by one of her girlfriends, is mocked and jeered at, and later raped by that girlfriend’s brother. Lizzie and Nina’s father falls in love with another woman for awhile; everyone in town knows about it.

It’s a world of rats in a maze over there in Willis. Disaster follows disaster. Injustice breeds resentment, which gives way to rage and self-destruction. When Nina returns, still technically a young woman, she is aged and used and sullen and sad. She has given her child away to a American Indian woman, who is surrounded by a flock of other kids on the reservation. This woman, never seen but only talked about, is the only character in the novel who has been able to “imagine” a way out of her life; to figure out a way to change from inside and make this existence bearable.

Lizzie, who has been looking all along for a way to be good, finally finds one: “At last I understood one small thing in this world, that to look at people as they were, without fear or shame, was a kind of healing, sometimes the only kind that mattered.”

But, I don’t know, with some of these people, especially the murderous father here, simple acceptance, even in fictional terms, seems to me to beg the question. It will be interesting to see what this talented writer takes up next, after her relentless description of this sad, sad town.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “Fox at the Wood’s Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley” by Gale E. Christianson (Henry Holt).