Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch : MONTANA WOMEN: A Novel <i> By Toni Volk</i> , <i> (Soho Press: $19.95; 310 pp.) </i>

By turns tough, funny, touching and spooky, Toni Volk’s first novel, “Montana Women,” is richly textured, full of surprises and inventive in its technique. Yet the book also possesses a homespun quality--exactly right for a tale of provincial Western life in the 1940s and 1950s.

This Montana woman is a wonderful writer.

Her novel centers around the lives of two sisters, Pearl and Etta. When it opens in 1944, Etta is widowed; Pearl’s lover is missing in action. Orphans, slightly odd, the sisters now live together in their old family house in Great Falls. But close as the young women are, their personalities are quite distinct.

Pearl “had large, black eyes that waited for something, needed something.” Etta, younger by a year, “had the same extraordinary eyes, yet hers were sharp and impertinent, as if to say there was nothing they would not dare look at.” These are the perceptions of Buck, the man who marries Pearl and takes her to live on his family ranch. Their daughter, Katie, is born on the day that the United States bombs Hiroshima.

Pearl, Buck, Katie and Etta form an uneasy family, and they struggle against a harsh, if beautiful, environment. At first Pearl loves ranch life; “it was only Buck that perplexed her.” Men, she decides, live in a “secret place,” always withholding something from her. Buck drinks heavily, and eventually Pearl realizes that he philanders, too.

Most of the men in “Montana Women” are unsatisfactory (as human beings, not as fictional characters); the bonds between Volk’s women are the ones that last. “Men were the strangest people on earth,” reflects Pearl. “There was no way to ever tell what they were thinking. They just went around doing what they wanted. Whether or not it was stunning or surprising, they didn’t seem to care.”

The portrait of Buck is a particular triumph. Despite his outrageous acts, he’s neither a villain nor a buffoon but a genuinely tragic figure. Born into ranching, he never really likes it, and never finds anything better to do.

Etta, too, is a remarkable character, a combination of sobriety and weirdness. She has supernatural experiences that give an unexpected dimension to Volk’s otherwise down-to-earth story, where desperate ranchers perform cow tracheotomies and weary waitresses mix Thousand Island dressing by the bucket.

As the novel ends in 1960, Pearl and Etta are living in their old house again, together with teen-ager Katie. An aspiring writer, Katie begins a journal “where she kept track of all the woman stories she’d ever heard.”

“What had happened to all those women?” Katie--a stand-in for Volk?--wonders. “It was anybody’s guess.”

Although Katie represents Toni Volk’s generation of Montana women, the author’s own story is different. A high school dropout at 16, a mother at 17, divorced at 22, Volk later earned degrees from both the University of Montana and the Iowa Writers Workshop. She has turned her experience and her talents to good use: the best revenge, after all. Like the hills of her home state, “Montana Women” is full of little bits of gold.