Southern Discomfort : BLUE CALHOUN, <i> By Reynolds Price (Atheneum: $23; 373 pp.)</i>

Readers of Reynolds Price have come to expect a certain something from the man--portraits of flawed, homely Southern men and women with messy pasts and proud bearings, living in a kind of Sophoclean twilight. Like the great Greek tragedian, Price opposes guilt and fate, agency and innocence, in a contest cleverly rigged by its creator. It is the certainty of the outcome--Price’s protagonists are always guilty and always forgiven--that brings people back to his books again and again in what amounts to a Christian celebration of human frailty.

“Blue Calhoun” is Price’s ninth novel (and 21st book). In theme and structure it is nearly identical to his most acclaimed work, “Kate Vaiden,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. Both are first-person, eponymous narrations told as if to a single listener who is then to render judgment upon the speaker; each relies for dramatic tension upon veiled relationships and onerous family secrets. If there is a difference between these two books, it is that “Blue Calhoun” more dangerously tries the very Christian spirit the narrator means to appeal to, jeopardizing the purity of a final absolution.

Bluford Calhoun, called “Blue” by most people and (in an annoying John Irvingism) “Sky” by his daughter, begins this book in 1986, when he is 66 years old. It is really a long letter to a person addressed only as “Darling” at the start, where Blue tells her that she may not be old enough to read the document when it is finished, and that he is leaving that decision to “Luna.” In short order it becomes clear who Luna is.

The story begins on a hot summer’s day in 1956. Blue is a recovering alcoholic employed as a clerk in a music store in Raleigh, N.C. Mightily impressed with his own perspicacity, he is given to such pronouncements as “I think I know where right and wrong live, most days at least. And I try to head there when I can, weather permitting.”

While “on the verge of sleep behind the pianos,” Blue is momentarily blinded by sunlight flashing from the front entrance, where the imposing figure of Rita Bapp stands. Rita is an old grade-school friend of Blue’s; she ran afoul of public mores long ago. Blue’s attention drifts until he hears song, and he sees another slender figure emerge: It is Rita’s daughter, Luna, 16, whose face and form will dog Blue’s life and dreams for years to come.

Although Blue is 36 years old at the time--married, with a house and a child and a mother he fawns over nearby--these things give him no hesitation, once he has seen Luna. He has sex with her that night; within 24 hours he has admitted as much to Luna’s mother and confessed it to his own mother. In a short time, his wife and daughter are on to him. His life careens out of control, or so he seems to feel. In actuality, all his loved ones wait upon him with saintly forbearance. He begs his mother: “A question, anything--start me talking. I’m in trouble here.”

His beloved Luna--”She’s true as light. . . . I aimed my own mind toward the sky and said a short thanks to the Milky Way if nothing else. I thought, Please let this last for good”--is nothing if not angelic, at least is Blue’s eyes. Possessed of a beautiful singing voice, she even carries a harp. Still, despite her silly portrait, Luna’s life has been a hard one. She lives in a small, dark house with her mother on the wrong side of Raleigh. “I’ve been underprivileged every day of my life till now, till you,” Luna tells Blue in the offhand tone that signals the depth of her own troubles. As the grim outlines of her history are revealed--she was sexually abused by her father and older brother--it becomes all the more disturbing that Blue doesn’t question the nature of her dependence upon him, a man 20 years her senior.

As in “Kate Vaiden,” where the sense of wartime Norfolk, complete with gas rations and war brides, is palpable, Price tries here to give glimpses of American life passing by, but with less success. For the most part, it is in a total social and cultural vacuum that Blue leaves his wife and quits his job. His proposal that he and Luna move to Florida, their short trip there, and the household they eventually share in Raleigh seem more fantasy than real. She cooks, he helps her with homework and they eat ice cream in bed. But for a few odd exchanges with blacks, the setting could be Duluth.

Most of the novel is taken up with but a year’s events. Things end for Blue and Luna on an Easter Sunday in 1957. The book’s final sections catch us up on what has happened since then--the body count, as it were--and brings Blue, retired and widowed, to the aid of his only child, Maddy.

It is Maddy’s victimization that Blue most regrets: She was 13 when Luna came into her father’s life. Although Maddy stuck by her mother throughout, she struggled hard and, in the end, triumphantly, to keep Blue whole and bring him back into the family.

Price handles the revelations about Maddy’s adulthood--college, marriage, motherhood--with a sure and measured hand. News of her fouled marriage and tragically declining health are the heavier, given the light and spunky character we had come to know as a child--heavier still once we realize that Maddy’s surviving daughter is the “Darling” of the book.

But that is exactly the point at which the reader may question Price’s judgment, and doubt the credibility of Blue Calhoun as a character. Why would Blue feel compelled to tell his granddaughter such things as this, about his own wife and her grandmother: “Myra was not the Brazilian Bombshell of conjugal bliss, but I’ll have to say she generally did her cheerful share. . . .” Why must Blue unload upon an angry, mourning teen-ager the whole sordid tale of his wrecked marriage, his affair with a minor and the unconscionable nature of what he proposes to do next? Although Blue is clearly angling for forgiveness, and fully expects to receive it, it is lost upon him how false his language rings, and how calculated his strategy.

In that imaginary space after and beyond the novel, where such petitions for clemency are soberly judged, Blue may or may not be pardoned. Reynolds Price may not be either.