Serpent’s Teeth : THIS WAY MADNESS LIES <i> By Thomas W. Simpson</i> , <i> (Warner Books: $19.95; 400 pp.) </i>

William Bailey Richford (Wild Bill) Winslow is the vinegary 70-year-old patriarch at the center of Thomas William Simpson’s first novel, a sprawling family saga set mostly in 1990 but with frequent hallucinatory forays into the Winslow clan’s 500-year-old past.

Wild Bill, a millionaire New Jersey real-estate developer, is the latest in a long line of domineering males whose intractable will to endure and prevail has kept the Winslow line intact from English origins through three centuries of New World history. Wild Bill has done his own best to pass on the Winslow heritage, siring seven official surviving sons and daughters as well as a few illegitimate offspring. The same bullheaded qualities that have seemingly served Wild Bill so well through the decades, though, have alienated his children. Now that their beloved mother is dead, few of the grown Winslow kids have much at all to do with the bossy old man.

That is where matters stand at the start of this seriocomic melodrama, a chronicle that owes something to the madcap violence of John Irving and something to the spectral devices of William Kennedy.

Wild Bill Winslow takes a tumble as this book begins, a fall down the back stairs of the family compound at Far Hills, N.J. The septuagenarian is moved to a Morristown hospital bed. From there he issues a call for his children to come home. The many and far-flung Winslows are to reassemble. “The Wild One” has a few matters to settle with his brood.

From Aspen, Colo., comes coke-snorting, womanizing Joseph, a smart-mouthed cynic who uses his father’s money to operate a ski shop and maintain a sybaritic lifestyle. From Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y., comes Henry, a reclusive forest ranger who for 21 years has been posing as his twin brother Bobby, who (posing as Henry) died in Vietnam. From Manhattan comes Emily, divorced mother and mostly unsuccessful actress whose current dream is to play Cordelia in a Central Park production of “King Lear.” From London comes Mary, the family genealogist, whose research brings her into frequent vivid contact with the shades of Winslows past.

Also answering the Wild One’s call are Barton, the sculptor, who may or may not be gay; Ginny, now married to a Bel Air pediatrician, and Edward, the seriously disturbed son who nurses a hatred for Wild Bill that borders on the murderous.

All the children have accepted Wild Bill’s financial support, but none is especially fond of the bellicose pater. There is more than enough misunderstanding to fuel the hodgepodge plot of “This Way Madness Lies,” whose title is a variant on a line spoken by Lear, that other patriarch burdened with imperfectly grateful heirs. Wild Bill Winslow eventually reconciles himself with a fate much kinder than King Lear’s, but not before all sorts of alarums and excursions, not to mention the occasional intervention by those ever-present Winslow ancestors.

Thomas Simpson puts his many characters through their paces with unflagging energy. His prose seems for the most part equal to the ambitious task he has set himself: the interweaving of past and present in a family tapestry that spans the centuries and girdles the globe.