BOOK REVIEW : South’s Past Keeps Its Grip on the Present : THE FAVORITE SONS, <i> by John Russell,</i> Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $19.95; 318 pages

This novel appropriately appears during an election season, where two of the three candidates hail from the South, and the third “resides” in the South, even though he spends his time in Maine.

“The Favorite Sons” examines Southern belief systems of three different stamps, and reminds us that although the South may have lost the War Between the States 127 years ago, it has since won countless, countless ideological skirmishes.

Roger Albright, in 1938, is a freshman at a North Carolina university. His grandfather fought bravely in the aforementioned war, but since then it’s been all downhill for the Albright family. Roger has nothing left but a sad mother, a distant sister and a flock of perfect bloodlines with which to face the world. That’s not enough.

At the university, Roger meets Worth Patterson, whose grandfather was an infamous Southern robber baron. There’s Patterson money to burn, but Worth has his own agenda cut out for him--a mandate to make his fortune respectable--to do good in this world.

Both Roger and Worth fall under the spell of a charismatic professor, Tal Ogden, whose life purpose seems to be watch over his boys’ lives. Ogden has gathered enthusiastic students--some of them even Northern, some of them even radical--to study “knowledge,” and having attained that knowledge, to use it to do “good.”

It’s an amorphous ambition (which makes a great deal of the book amorphous too), but at some level, Prof. Ogden would seem to want the South to rise again--this time in a moral, uplifting, ethical, idealistic fashion that will improve all mankind.

Roger, his mind made quick by the desperation of poverty and a natural knack for figures, writes a landmark thesis on the textile industry in the South. Prof. Ogden rewards him with only a grade of B, but Roger goes on to found a textile industry of his own that quickly makes him worth $250 million. (He’s kind of a dimwit though, always a step or two behind the reader, his girlfriend, and even his bovine wife.)

Worth, so kind, so pompous and equally dim, has already fallen in love with Roger’s wife. No good can come from this. But beyond his disarrayed personal life, Worth runs for the House of Representatives and then the Senate. He represents the enlightened South, a good man with good intentions who is going to save the world whether it wants to be saved or not.

But nipping at their heels, somewhere out in the boondocks, is a Swamp Thing called Joe Crain, a shrill, fundamentalist “Christian” whose followers speak in tongues and handle snakes and don’t care much about anything except pickup trucks and country music and homophobia and hating black folk. Crain followers thrive on hatred and negative ads and deceptive sound bites. It’s inevitable that two-thirds of the way through this novel, the hate-filled, bestial Joe Crain will defeat the idealistic Worth Patterson for senator.

The last third of this novel deals with the depressions and confusions of the second generation here. (Certain complications exist already.) In political, even metaphysical terms, what is everybody supposed to do? Must Roger remain forever a slave to business? Must Worth be doomed to defeat, or is he simply ready for a newer, better life? What are all these wives and girlfriends and sisters supposed to do now?

This novel’s finest accomplishment appears in long, brooding, convoluted paragraphs about the stranglehold that the past exerts upon the present. This is especially true in the South, of course, where “defeat” still grates heavily and cruelly upon those who let it. The question of the barbarian, transcends region. Certainly 50% of us live off hate instead of affection, and barbarians don’t want to be “improved.” That’s why they’re barbarians.

Don’t look for “The Favorite Sons” to mirror the election we’re going through now. In this one, the poor white man speaks with an idealistic voice. The “bright” man from the “failed” Southern family speaks in the language of Boy Scouts or angels, and it’s the visiting Northern Aristocrat who has aligned with the gay haters and the snake handlers. Another 127 years from now? All new people, but very likely, a very similar election.