BOOK REVIEW : A Big Novel With Research to Spare : CAPE COD, <i> by William Martin</i> , Warner Books, $21.95, 652 pages

This is a white Protestant trip down memory lane--from the landing of the Mayflower somewhere on Cape Cod (actually from the landing of the Vikings on Cape Cod) right down to the present day. To call this a multigenerational saga is an understatement: It’s crammed with generations and full of historical information.

This novel has everything: Pilgrims who call each other thee and thou until you think you might scream: “Thou givest me a strong spine, me darlin’. And a strong son,” says one Mayflower goodwife before she dies of “the coughing sickness.” This book also has witches, adulteresses with scarlet letters, erring ministers, unscrupulous pirates, slaves and slavers.

The jacket blurb, in hopeful words, compares “Cape Cod” to James Michener’s work and opines that this book will attract the “widest possible audience.” You have to take this humongous novel in that context then, and it’s possible to say that maybe it’s 10% worth the Michener and 90% better than John Jakes.

The author has researched and researched and, yes, done some more research. The prose, though pedestrian, is never awful. The anachronisms are kept to a bare minimum.

The premise is this: Out there on the Mayflower, as it’s bobbing along the North Atlantic in the year 1620, Jack Hilyard and Ezra Bigelow begin to get on each other’s nerves. Jack doesn’t believe in God quite as much as he should, and Ezra Bigelow tends to bring God into everything.

After the ship lands and things go from bad to worse, Jack, the natural upstart, announces he’s irritated with God and gets in a peck of trouble. Ezra, on the other hand, develops a crush on William Bradford’s wife. (Bradford; first governor, right?)

The ship’s captain writes it all down in his log, which keeps mysteriously disappearing and reappearing from the year 1620 to the present day, changing the lives of all who see it. And the Bigelows and the Hilyards keep bickering about who really owns the Cape Cod island called Jack’s Island, which ought to give them a clue.

Right around the Civil War, one of the Bigelow or Hilyard ladies, first name Nancy, gets involved with the underground railroad sending slaves north to a precarious freedom. A kid is born on one of their boats, the son of a black woman and a white plantation owner. The unfortunate family takes the name Nance (after Nancy) and the Nance progeny will figure heavily, but not nicely, in the rest of this book.

Get born, look for the missing log, turn up your toes and die: That’s what they tend to do in this book. Meanwhile, in the present, the Bigelows want to put condos on Jack’s Island and the Hilyards--well, they’re dreamers. Particularly Geoff Hilyard. He wants to find the log, save the island and stop working at a 9-to-5 job.

Geoff’s married to Janice, a grim Bigelow who won’t have sex with him, laughs at his dreams and loves condos more than life itself. He has two buddies--George, a nice gay guy, and Jimmy, descended from Cape Cod Indians--who join him in wanting to save the island and find the log. But you can guess that Mr. Nance, descended from that slave and her owner, has other plans.

I’m still interested in this “widest possible audience” they’re talking about on the cover. I don’t see why any woman would want to pay good money to learn once again that the men of the race are dreamers, and the women are sexless, wretched little nits.

I don’t see why immigrants would want to pick this up either. I’m not too sure how it will sell west of the Mississippi, or even the Hudson, since much of this material is what we learned in the sixth grade and strove to forget.

But again, there is plenty of good research work here. If you have an uncle or a dad or a cousin who went to Harvard, or who loves to fish or play golf, or who thinks immigrants are a blot on the America escutcheon, or who thinks that his wife was the one who kept him from having all the good times in his life, “Cape Cod” is for him. Buy it now; give it to him for Christmas.

Next: Oleg Grabar reviews “The Art and Architecture of the Islamic World,” by Katharina Otto-Dorn (University of California Press).