BOOK REVIEW : Telling Stories About Family Ties : IN MEMORY OF JUNIOR <i> by Clyde Edgerton</i> , Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $16.95; 215 pages

In Clyde Edgerton’s fifth novel, “In Memory of Junior,” a father produces a whittled stick from his shirt pocket and tells his troubled adolescent son that “there’s a story behind that stick.”

It seems that one afternoon on the North Carolina coast, Tate Bales had allowed a baby-sitter and her cousins to take his then-3-year-old son, Morgan, out sailing. A bad storm had come up and, at 6 o’clock, when it was due back in port, there was no sign of the boat.

Sitting at the dock in a picnic shelter, worried sick, Tate had picked up a stick and started whittling. Finally the storm passed and the boat appeared. Since that day, Tate tells his son, he’s kept that stick--and on this particular day he has just returned with the stick from his father’s funeral.

In Clyde Edgerton territory--the tragicomic junction of the old, small-town, agricultural North Carolina and the brave new world of “60 Minutes” on TV, freeway traffic in the Research Triangle and high tech--there’s a story behind every stick. Every object, almost, is the occasion for a story. And every character--whether a listener wants to listen or not--is a bittersweet storyteller, reeling in the meaning of an experience on a long line of words, as a fisherman reels in a fish.

More than any of Edgerton’s previous novels, even the Vietnam-haunted “The Floatplane Notebooks,” “In Memory of Junior”--the title refers to a tombstone inscription--is about how a family comes to terms with death.

Tate’s ne’er-do-well brother Faison has lost his stepson in a car wreck, and three other characters are dying of natural causes at the same time: Grove McCord, who has returned from Arkansas to his native North Carolina to die and to be buried in the red clay of his youth; Glenn Bales, Tate and Faison’s father, an ex-farmer and vacuum cleaner salesman, and Laura Bales, his homemaker wife, Tate and Faison’s stepmother.

And, as are all of Edgerton’s novels, “In Memory of Junior” is about the ties that bind--family ties. At stake for Tate, Faison and other family members is the old Bales family “home place,” a farm once but now a multimillion-dollar piece of real estate in the New South. Not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings, Glenn has refused to draw up a will, leaving family members to feud over who deserves what, and how much.

The genius of this novel, however, is that above all else--and going beyond Edgerton’s previous work--it is about storytelling. It is about how stories--and, therefore, the reality of family members to other family members--are often lost in the fire and smoke of social change. At the same time, it is about how stories sometimes bridge generations, transmitting values and the meaning of lives, refusing to let traditions die.

Edgerton’s method is simple: virtually every character, from gravedigger to those soon to be in the grave, takes one or more short turns as narrator, as if the novel were a relay race with each character/runner passing the baton. Often the same events are narrated twice, even three times. As characters filter those events through their own biases, or as they retell a story that they heard another character tell first, we learn not only who they are and how they feel about each other but also how stories themselves create a family’s and a community’s mythology.

Edgerton has little passion for intricate plotting, and although he uses it for the kind of outlandish comedy for which he has become celebrated, some of the more far-fetched events--a gravedigger falling into a grave in the middle of the night, an old man trying to shoot himself in a coffin, a truck carrying a tombstone hitting a railroad bridge, a small plane crashing with a load of rattlesnakes--collide head-on with scenes that are grittily realistic.

With all his characters, Edgerton’s ear is so good it can make your hair stand on end. But the real splendor is in the storytelling--and in the characters who do the telling. Edgerton lets them do the talking, and they can say things you won’t forget. “And you know,” says old Grove McCord, “whatever you leave behind is your history, and it better be good, because you’re history longer than you are fact.”