Dreaming Deep in the Heart of Texas : WILDCATTING, <i> By Shann Nix (Doubleday: $21.95; 402 pp.)</i>

“It is said that we kill each other in my family, and it may be true.” So begins Shann Nix’s family saga, “Wildcatting.” A first person narrator. A first novel. “It may be because we are from Texas,” she continues. “The long alkali flats, and the oil boiling beneath them, make people mad.”

The narrator is young. She is obsessed with the ghost of her grandfather and the ghosts of a place invaded by dreams. Her heroes are people of destruction in the tradition of the Romantic poets. Even if we can’t believe that Texas makes people more crazy than, say, Delaware, we believe the importance of the story to Nix, the staying power of the myth of Texas to Texans.

Families disintegrate, but their stories survive in the way of chameleons, colored pink or blue or musty brown, shaped by the landscape of the storyteller. We define ourselves by inventing a family mythology and placing ourselves inside of it. We finger artifacts of the dead as if they were genetic messages in Braille. A teacup for Proust; her grandmother’s writing desk for Shann Nix--or, more accurately, for the narrator, who convinces us she is the author. Memory is a kind of fiction, and vice versa.

Read on. Maybe the author’s imagination hasn’t been infected by watching too many episodes of “Dallas.” Obsession, after all, is what drives art.

The grandfather’s name was Hiram Jameson. He died when the narrator was 15. In passages that read like actual memories, we see an actual man. “My grandfather Hiram was high-waisted and elegant, with hair that went silver at the temples, and glasses. I called him Sir. His hands were gentle. There was hair on the backs of his knuckles, which were broad and rough.”

But there is another vision at work here, and the Hiram of the storyteller’s imagination is Paul Newman on a wide screen. This Hiram is “a sonofabitch, a wild man with a white widow’s peak and eyes the dry blue of the Texas sky. He could jump six feet straight up in the air with weighted heels, ride two horses bareback with a foot on each, drink a bottle of whiskey upside down.” True to form, this Hiram is quite a hand with the women. “Women surrounded him with their bodies, reflecting him like a pool. . . . They paid for that, in the end.”

In an era of women writing about the power of women or the powerlessness of women it shocks our sensibilities to know that Shann Nix, an au courant San Francisco journalist, is writing in such thrall to the power of a virile glamorous man. It’s as if she were proclaiming the forbidden glories of co-dependency, cigarettes and T-bones. Not everyone’s meat.

“Wildcatting” is a big, old-fashioned novel whose action takes place over four generations, spanning the 20th Century. The large cast descends from two branches, the Jamesons and the Frankells. The Jameson clan drifts from Oklahoma to Dallas country, with side trips to Louisiana and Missouri; the Frankells are more deeply rooted in the dry plains of the Texas Panhandle, but find their way east to the green hill country of Austin.

The narrator grew up in New York, where her parents have cut themselves free of Texas. They live the cultured, Bohemian lives of artists. The only Texas the narrator knows--really knows--is the Texas of summer vacations on her grandfather Hiram’s spread. And the Texas she offers the reader is the dream of that summer child--vivid details like shards of a broken stained-glass window.

Nix attempts to create the dusty world of the Texas frontier out of family stories and library research. She would like to give us the fine, particular worlds of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” or Cormac McCarthy’s borderlands in “All the Pretty Horses.” But McMurtry and McCarthy are grounded in Texas and its history. Nix is not. So the anecdotes Nix tells of great-grandfather Big Joe Frankell surveying the high dry sweep of the Staked Plains with his English sidekick Diggory have the curious charm of tall tales, but also their emotional distance.

Which brings us to the central narrative of “Wildcatting”--the story of Hiram Jameson and his mismatched wife Anise. They bear three daughters; the narrator’s mother, Amelia, is the eldest. Amelia is the most absent character in a family drama that reaches its crisis because of her rebellion against her father.

Young Hiram is a delightful, fun-loving father; but he is on the road most of the time and Anise retreats into books and religion and the pursuit of household perfection. Hiram’s contracting business fails and he becomes a roughneck in the Louisiana oil fields, then a wildcatter based in Dalhart, Tex. As the narrator tries to put herself into Hiram’s mind, she falls into what is the greatest stylistic fault in this novel, that exalted, overwritten prose: “The ground there cradled its secret, the black blood beating in his ears like a tempest. The earth was dry, for as far as he could see--but underneath the surface was an unlit sea, a crouching surf of living green oil that swayed and tilted with the earth’s rotation, the oily drops flowing through the veins of the caverns beneath him like a pulse.”

Oil is the promise in this story; but Hiram’s lot was dry holes. Oddly enough, Anise’s father, Big Joe Frankell, leaves his kin a fat oil well that can support all of them in good style. But after Anise dies the long death of cancer, Hiram tries to cheat his daughters out of their inheritance.

Amelia won’t stand for it. Hiram’s willfulness and greed bring the family he has sired and loved down in ruins. He will die a bitter and heart-broken old man. And Amelia’s daughter, the narrator, will be plagued by guilt. Torn between loyalty to her parents and to her grandfather, she will be forced to desert Hiram--the one she loves above all else. She will wonder if her desertion killed him.

But most important, most true, is the narrator’s first-person story of a little girl in love with an old man. Sir was a legendary horseman, and he taught the narrator to ride. He’d put her on a skittish horse, smack the horse a good one on the rump, and see what happened next. “He gave me gifts silently, like a lover,” the narrator remembers. “He gave me spurs in a box, wrapped in white tissue. They were silver arcs, with a star that spun.” She remembers the breakfasts she ate with Sir--Raisin Bran and toast with peanut-butter, the toast burned black by grandmother Anise.

And she remembers a day when she was 12 and found Sir in his bedroom stripped to his underwear. “I could see what he couldn’t. The crumplings of the skin, the hairless, sunken chest, the bony shoulders . . . I went into the pale blue bathroom and vomited with fear. He had always promised me that he would live forever.”

What touches us in this novel is not the melodrama or the tall tales, not the dreamscapes and romantic ghosts, certainly not places like Dallas, which we never see clearly. What moves the reader and redeems the story is the love and fear of a child. A love that wants to keep death at bay by creating a fairy-tale myth. A love that causes a grown woman to attempt to keep the promise no Sir could ever keep.