Black Beans and Cabbage : THE FOURTEEN SISTERS OF EMILIO MONTEZ O’BRIEN, <i> By Oscar Hijuelos (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $21; 484 pp.)</i>

In “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” Oscar Hijuelos wrote of a close provincial world. It was a displaced province made up of Cubans and Cuban-Americans in New York in the ‘40s and ‘50s. They struggled in menial jobs and lived in grimy sixth-floor walk-ups or janitors’ basements while sustaining a culture of musical intimacy and celebration that was partly nostalgia for their old island and partly a vigorous though constricted transplant to their new one.

“The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien” attempts to decant this highly flavored culture into what is less an American melting pot than an American cooling chamber. Hijuelos’ new novel is a multigenerational epic, akin in some ways to the family sagas that have been written about Irish-Americans and Scandinavian-Americans, among others.

At the end of the 19th Century, a Pennsylvania photographer, himself an immigrant from Ireland, goes to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War. He stays on for a while, marries Mariela, a young Cuban woman, and brings her to live in his small town. They have 14 daughters and a son. The novel evokes the superheated colors of their home and marks what fades and what doesn’t as the children move out and live on into their 80s and 90s.

None of them die young, which is less odd than symptomatic of the book’s fundamental character and, to some extent, of its weakness. Also symptomatic are their numbers. And finally, so is the father’s name: Nelson O’Brien.

It is not literally impossible for an Irish Catholic to have Nelson as a first name, though as a modest research effort, I can report that there is not a single Nelson among the hundreds of listings in the Boston telephone books for O’Brien, O’Connor, Murphy, Flynn and eight or nine other classics. Not literally impossible, no; but imaginatively impossible.

This is not a quibble. Nelson is a major character. His Irish boyhood is described, and so are his adventures in Cuba, his courtship and marriage to Mariela, and his activities as a modestly successful photographer and movie-house operator in Pennsylvania. He is kind, tolerant, restless, occasionally moody and tends to drink too much. Yet he disappears in the intense Latino atmosphere of his home; and this is not so much because his character is mild or weak, as because he has no essential flavor or reality; neither Irish nor Irish-American nor anything else.

He is little more than a piece of Hijuelos’ design, a bridge over which the Cuban tradition that the author captures so well can confront the multiethnic American world for which he has no real feeling. The 15 children lose reality as they move out into the world from their home. They are yeast spores, but Hijuelos gives them no bread dough to act upon. His America is possible but abstract, a blueprint and not a place.

Equally, it is possible to conceive that one daughter will become a successful model, three others will form a singing trio that will tour Europe and America for 50 years, a fifth will become a clairvoyant with a prominent clientele, and the son--Emilio--will become a B-movie star who cuts a swathe among women and pals around with Errol Flynn.

All these things are possible, just as the number of O’Briens is possible, and the fact that they all stay alive over eight decades to mark out 15 places in the American scene. But they don’t occupy their places. They have no necessary relationship to them; they, too, are blueprints.

Hijuelos’ empathy, intuition and talent remain rooted in the O’Briens’ Cuban heritage and in an ethnic and cultural past. They are most palpable as children. As adults, they disappear into a textureless and thinly written activity.

Certainly, the book’s first part is richly imagined and lushly written. With its 14 girls--Emilio is the last-born--the household is all enthusiastic cooking, baby-tending, adolescent fantasizing and ebullient sensuousness. “The feminine presence was so strong,” Hijuelos writes, “that passing horsemen fell off their horses and cars crashed in the ditch out front.” When a biplane makes a forced landing after flying overhead, the feminine aura is also credited (although it is suggested that a faulty engine may have been responsible).

Hijuelos centers the story, for a while, on Margarita, the oldest daughter. She hums with incipient passion, a passion that will eventually be misdirected into marriage to a prosperous young neighbor. The husband’s own apparent passion is actually a cold erotomania. There are a number of detailed sex scenes--one of them an oddlyplaced flashback when Margarita is in her old age--that are all meat and sentimentality.

In the early sections, Hijuelos’ magic-realist style is reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It is forced and honeyed, though, without the authentic wit and mystery of the Colombian writer. The writing becomes plainer once the children grow up and the author is faced with the task of telling each of their lives. Fifteen lives is a lot to handle, and Hijuelos tends to handle it in the manner of a family round-robin letter, sketchily jumping from one life to the next.

The book’s best writing comes with the last days of Nelson and Mariela and with Margarita in her failing 90s. Their hallucinatory dream-states and fragments of childhood memory provide an emotional coherence and authenticity that Hijuelos mostly fails to achieve. It is the past that really holds him. “The Fourteen Sisters” is more an album of family snapshots than a novel. We need the voice of an old rememberer, who sits alongside and turns the pages, to bring them alive. Only in the sunset moments of Nelson, Mariela and Margarita is such a voice finally heard.