FICTION

BEYOND DESERVING, by Sandra Scofield (The Permanent Press: $21.95; 310 pp.) Sandra Scofield has written a successful novel about the contemporary American family, and done it the hard way. Her style is plain. Her characters are all reasonably normal. She has no gift for local color--her Southern Oregon and West Texas could be anywhere. She almost thumbs her nose at suspense. Between the opening, in which Katie Fisher flees her semi-abusive husband, Fish, and leaves her baby girl with her mother, and the climax, in which the girl, now 9, visits Katie and Fish as they wobble between divorce and reconciliaton, is a 216-page section called “Becalmed,” in which three generations of Fishers . . . simply live.

“For 50 years,” Katie reflects, “the Fishers have been saying wrong things, or nothing at all, or pretending to talk while they speak riddles and small deceits.” The chief offenders, as usual, are the men. Fish opens up only after nightmares about Vietnam and jail. His father, Gully, is more intimate with drunks he finds in the woods than with his wife of a half-century. Fish’s twin brother, Michael, is self-contained and calm--maddeningly so in the opinion of his wife, Ursula, a social worker whose contact with truly dysfunctional families makes her fear for her own.

Scofield (“Gringa”) asks basic questions here: Will the Fishers, fractured lengthwise by the battle of the sexes and sideways by the generation gap, yet bound by love as evanescent and tough as fishing line, stand or fall? When Katie gives up her daughter, is it pathology or an instinctive avoidance of something worse? How “alternative” can a family get before it crumbles?

We keep waiting for the answers, even through that long middle section, because Scofield respects all her characters and takes us convincingly into their minds. She shows a talent for big, messy scenes with a dozen people colliding at cross purposes. And her patient accumulation of thousands of details about the Fishers reminds us that most family novels, in comparison, are cartoons.