FICTION

AGASSIZ by Sandra Birdsell (Milkweed Editions: $18.95; 346 pp.) . After the great Southern Manitoba flood of 1950, houses in the fictional town of Agassiz are marked where the high water stood. When a levee is built to prevent another such disaster, bulldozers unearth human bones--an Indian burial ground.

This persistence of the past is one of the themes of what Sandra Birdsell calls a “novel in stories.” The town barber, Maurice Lafreniere, is ashamed of his Indian heritage and spends his life denying it, only to be claimed by it in a vision at his death. His wife, Mika, rebels against her strict Russian Mennonite upbringing, but to her six children--especially the daughters--she is the voice of judgment, keeping alive Old World customs and a sense of sin.

In making each of this book’s 23 chapters a self-contained story, Birdsell sacrifices the conventional novel’s big climax for a number of smaller ones, plus the freedom to move easily among tones and points of view. The most vivid characters are at either extreme--the old religious people, surviving so long that they have become oddities, and Mika’s granddaughters, writing letters full of love, anger, sibling rivalry, Def Leppard mania and curiosity about sex and drugs.

The characters in the middle, Mika’s daughters, are distinct at first but blend into a pattern. They run off to the big city, Winnipeg, and get pregnant too soon and marry men who drink too much, like their father. It’s a domestic, working-class pattern, not without a grudging happiness. Weird and criminal things happen, but only at the margins. Faith flickers but never quite dies. The women struggle to develop their often considerable talents, even as Birdsell shows the flood of ordinariness marking them indelibly, smoothing them like identical stones.