Fame and Misfortune : FEATHER CROWNS, <i> By Bobbie Ann Mason (HarperCollins: $23; 454 pp.)</i>

As “Feather Crowns” opens, it is 1900. A Kentucky farm wife is giving birth to quintuplets, the first ever recorded in America. As I read, I became deeply worried--needlessly, as it turned out--that this long novel was going to be another paean to the good old days of subsistence farming, when life was hard but hearts were hardy--the primordial Waltons myth that always sustains Americans when urban going gets tough.

The opening pace of the book was so leisurely that I felt I was actually living the cycle of the seasons, as fields were tilled and crops were planted and harvested by an extended family of unremarkable country people. But my own attention was sustained because I grew up on an Appalachian tobacco farm 50 years after this story takes place, so I was fascinated by Mason’s vivid and accurate depiction of the routines of such a setting. I was also riveted by her use of the antique words and cadences of that region, where life may be toilsome and boresome yet people can be pert-near the thoughtfullest you could ever encounter.

Mason reminded me of superstitions I had long since abandoned in my pursuit of sophistication, such as the notion that eating a pie point first is bad luck. (But what if it is, I found myself wondering.) And she used some similes I hadn’t heard since childhood, such as, “He didn’t know any more about loving than a dead horse does about Sunday.” And, “This room ain’t big enough to cuss a cat in!” And, there was “more noise at the depot than 99 cows and a bob-tailed bull.”

So I read on helplessly, marveling over the power of the language I had taken for granted as a child, feeling I was trapped with my Cumberland cousins at a Sunday dinner that would never end. The five babies finally got themselves born. The family was struggling to care for and feed them. And I was beginning to dread the prospect of several hundred pages of feed-sack diapers scrubbed on a tin washboard in cold spring water, and teething soothed by pennyroyal poultices--even while secretly mourning this lost world in which an infant had been welcomed by a family as a future farmhand, rather than budgeted for as a quarter-million dollar expenditure.

But suddenly the story shifted, and I abruptly found myself in the middle of a brilliantly sustained and grimly humorous parable about fame in 20th-Century America. The five babies are “discovered” by the media. Reporters appear. Trainloads of sightseers arrive. The family itself collaborates, selling tickets and refreshments, allowing the crowds to handle the babies. The visitors trample the fields and strew the yard with trash.

Eventually the weakest baby dies, and the local mortician contrives to preserve her in a glass case, introducing a series of events as lugubrious as any Flannery O’Connor or Carson McCullers ever dreamed of. Appalled that I was going to have to watch the four other babies sicken and die one by one, “Ten Little Indians” style, I was almost relieved to have them speedily join their sister in her hermetically sealed glass case. When a seedy impresario persuades the parents to take their dead quints on the road for the edification of the public, they wind up in a carnival side show in a town that is hosting a raucous hanging.

This plot may sound far-fetched, but Mason’s stunning morality tale about the process by which such degradation can overtake innocent people who simply need cash or long for some excitement is extremely illuminating--and especially for anyone alive today who has ever pondered the ravages of our modern publicity juggernaut. Mason illustrates how a creation conceived in love, passion and integrity can be transformed into a grotesque parody, one which kills off the vital impulse that generated the phenomenon in the first place. And how an audience--bored, overworked and upset in their private lives--can seize any promised diversion with such desperation that they destroy the source--killing the goose that has laid the golden eggs, to extend the barnyard metaphor.

The only bone I would pick with this magnificent novel is that it goes on too long, spelling out the parallels to latter-day victims of this process like Elvis Presley. Also, the mother of the quints insists on appearing in first person at the end of the book, a wise old woman by that point, draped like the Ancient Mariner with her down-home albatross--a need to explain the overall sociological and personal significance of her grisly experience with the quintuplets. But these important elements are already implicit in the wonderfully told story and would, to my mind, have been more evocative left that way. However, getting an Appalachian farm wife to stop talking once she’s gotten going is, as in one of Mason’s marvelous similes, as hopeless as shooing a skunk out of a churn.