BOOK REVIEW : Newspaper Family Scion Takes a Turn at ‘Southern’ Fiction : SMALL VICTORIES <i> By Sallie Bingham</i> ; Zoland Books; $20.95; 308 pages

Sallie Bingham may be a little like the Holly Hunter character in “Broadcast News.” Life was so complicated for Holly, Girl Producer, that she had to start each day with a shaking-heaving-sobbing-screaming cry. Then she’d stop, take a deep breath and move on.

In “Passion and Prejudice,” Bingham’s 1989 family memoir, this able and experienced writer gave us a primitive, bloodcurdling howl. Her version of life among the famous newspaper Binghams of Kentucky--an angry nonfiction look at the damnable patriarchy that she believes led to the loss of her father’s Louisville Courier-Journal empire--was so loud it made your ears ache.

Now, after a silence of three years and a period of establishing new roots in Prospect, Ky., near but apart from her relatives, Bingham has reached beyond the anger to produce a fictional work that assimilates many of the familial and regional themes she knows so well.

“Small Victories” is about two middle-aged sisters living in the old homestead in the old way, content yet dependent on the flashier, politically powerful, New Age branch of the family. Louise, frail in physique but strong in self-knowledge, cares for her younger sister, Shelby, retarded from birth and prone to severe seizures. They live in a small North Carolina town on the grounds of a once-thriving military academy where their father is headmaster.

They have been supported by their cousin, Big Tom, who lived one year with them while attending the school and formed a deep bond with Louise. He is now socially prominent, a Kentucky state senator.

He secretly arranges to have Shelby committed to a home for the mentally disturbed. It is 1958 and ideals, as Louise sees it, are slipping. Old friends are not what they were.

“It was the house that did it,” Louise says, and in the tradition of classic Southern literature, we see it: Big Tom ensconced in his granite-pillared mansion, wearing matching suede jacket and loafers with coordinating ascot, driven by a chauffeur and fed by a Chinese cook. The stairway railing (always a giveaway in this genre) is custom-made of fashionable black iron with a velvet-padded banister.

Back in Elizaville, Louise remains with Shelby, eating off place mats with birds on them. Drippy fern plants rot the sitting-room floor, but years of stroking have kept the old mahogany stair rail glowing and soft to the touch.

The story’s conflicts are between old ways and new, family loyalty and public image. Love and sexuality are set against fear and social convention. While Big Tom, the politician, can revive a ravaged city center, there is no reviving the ravaged core of people cut off from communication, hiding behind myths and half-truths. Insensitive to their own or anyone else’s feelings, they have created a psychological construct difficult to live in and impossible to escape.

So dominant are Bingham’s images of false civility and hardness of spirit that we might not buy the story as whole had she not also given us the magnificent Shelby.

Soft and warm and fat, drooling and sweating, she is the other side of the universe, the other side of the world. She laughs when she feels good, cries when she does not and emits a loud, menacing moan when she’s deciding between the two. Shelby has become too embarrassing for Big Tom’s public image, a “shame and humiliation” for him.

Louise is savvy enough to harness young Tom’s doubting nature by hitting him with heavy doses of truth. She writes him letters while he is wallowing Hamlet-like at college, telling him exactly how his younger brother died (he did not fall but jumped out of their childhood treehouse), how his grandmother died (by leaping into the French Broad River), his grandfather (a simple shot to the head) and his father’s mother (in a car crash somehow survived by Big Tom himself).

That’s a lot of truth to bear (almost as much as Sallie Bingham has had in her own life) but, as Louise reminds him, to know is the best defense.

While young Tom observes, Louise mounts a successful revolt against the incarceration of Shelby, ingeniously rescuing her from the conditions of the mental ward.

Bingham holds out hope for the young. Her book is dedicated to “JWB,” apparently a reference to her beloved brother Jonathan Worth Bingham who, at 21, was electrocuted while trying to splice some outdoor lights into a power line for a reunion of his Scout troop at the family estate. In the character of young Tom, confused but striving for answers, she sees a future.

The choices, Louise tells Tom, are his. He can move ahead and seek to become a big man intending to better the big world, as his father did, or stay behind: “You can go on here with me and Shelby and cut firewood in the winter. You can go down to Herman’s on Saturday mornings to pick up some doughnuts for breakfast. You can take us to the movies now and then.” It is “something,” she says, “not nothing.”

The small victory is in making a choice, acting on your own destiny. For Louise, the victory is in winning back Shelby and the power she derives from caring for her. It is only a small victory but it is “something.”

Just as this book is a small victory for Sallie Bingham.