BOOK REVIEW : Need for Truth Fuels Gilchrist Novel : NET OF JEWELS<i> by Ellen Gilchrist</i> ; Little, Brown $21.95, 368 pages

Ellen Gilchrist refracts life through a prism of precious gems, a net of jewels. Her fiction is always a kind of prose poem, a dance of seven veils.

Like all of Gilchrist’s work, her latest novel dazzles and pulsates, and even in the few passages of below-normal sheen, “Net of Jewels” still qualifies as an almost imperceptibly flawed diamond.

It is the story of Rhoda Manning, a character who, in the hands of another writer, probably one with three names, would be described as “headstrong,” “reckless” and “willful.” Since I don’t have three names, and I live near the beach, I’ll describe her this way: She “charges.”

She’s got life inside of her, like another great heroine of the South, Maggie the Cat. Gilchrist fans will remember Rhoda from “Victory Over Japan,” “I Cannot Get You Close Enough” and “The Anna Papers.” Those reading Gilchrist for the first time will find out why Rhoda Manning is so memorable.

In “Net of Jewels,” we meet Rhoda as a college student in the Deep South of 1955, a time when, after having sex once or twice, people who confused sex with love got married in order to have more sex.

Rhoda and the other inhabitants of her world may think they are exercising free will when they head out on life’s road, but Gilchrist knows better. “There is a biological necessity for truth,” Rhoda tells her hypocritical father when he asks her not to divulge a damaging secret. “I read that somewhere.”

Rhoda, in fact, has read a lot of things somewhere (Emily Dickinson, Plato, Cervantes), escaping small-town and small-mind incarceration through books. But her quest for truth demands a physical flight as well, taking her on a journey from her father’s home into college, first love, marriage, motherhood, divorce and, in the spirit of Thomas Wolfe, back to her father’s home again.

Along the way, she stops at a Klan rally and meets civil rights workers, not by design but simply by being part of the world. The plot problems that inevitably arise in portraying a life driven by passion rather than plans are diminished by the quality of Gilchrist’s observations, descriptions and dialogue.

This is not to say that Rhoda did not have an actual plan, of sorts. She wanted to be a writer when she grew up. As she says in the preface of the book, “I want to get this straight at the outset, before we set up camp for three hundred and fifty-nine pages. . . . I should have known when I decided to call a book ‘Net of Jewels’ I was going to be in trouble. . . .”

For Rhoda, the trouble started long before she decided to write a book. On her way to being a writer, she got sidetracked by life and almost never arrived.

With her temperament, this was bound to happen. “My daddy is a vain and beautiful man who thinks of his children as extensions of his personality. . . . You have to know that to understand this story, which is about my setting forth to break the bonds he tied me with.”

It also sets the tone for “Net of Jewels,” which begins with Rhoda’s father telling her that the family is moving from Southern Illinois back to Alabama. “Sister,” he says, using his standard form of address for his daughter, “I’m going to bring you a car so you can drive down there when school’s out.”

It is one of many attempts to control his daughter, and it works temporarily, as they all do. In fact, no matter how far Rhoda strays from her father’s orbit--which, as she later realizes, is never really far--she is drawn back.

Perhaps at no time is this father-daughter bond more constricting than when her marriage to a younger version of her father fails and she returns with her two sons.

As her brother has been unable to produce heirs to the Manning throne, father Manning not only arranges Rhoda’s divorce but also almost convinces Rhoda to let him adopt the boys and raise them as if they were his own.

“About my father and the con job he did to get me to quit Vanderbilt,” Rhoda recalls. “Well, we owed him a lot that year, although we didn’t know it. He had given up his true love for us. So we owed him our lives, didn’t we?. . . . A short, large-hipped, slightly tacky lady who had done his books the year he made a million dollars. . . . Doesn’t it always come down to a woman? someone would later write.”

Fortunately, Rhoda herself later decides to write. Rhoda Manning--and her creator, Ellen Gilchrist--are both seized by the urge to purge, fueled by the same fire: the biological necessity for truth.