BOOK REVIEW: FICTION : Family Bonds Break in a Season of Grief : THE LAUGHING PLACE <i> by Pam Durban</i> ; Scribners, $21, 344 pages

The tale of two widows who happen to be mother and daughter, of their intertwined bond, is at the heart of Pam Durban’s debut novel, “The Laughing Place.” Set in tiny Timmons, S.C., the novel traces a season of grief in the life of the recently widowed 33-year-old protagonist, Annie Vess.

With its hovering palmetto trees, its ghosts of Confederates past, its gloomy humidity and smoldering family secrets, “The Laughing Place” follows in the grand tradition of the Southern Gothic.

The novel opens with the death of Annie’s idealized father, John Vess, an attorney who waged a quixotic, seven-year crusade to prevent the damming of two rivers in Vaucluse County and subsequent creation of Lake Charles B. Hartley Jr.

The family’s primitive but magical summer fish camp “perched up on stilts” on land now flooded by the lake--the laughing place--serves as an apt metaphor for the paradise Annie ultimately tries to create for herself.

John Vess was a man of principle. “And principles were not something you picked up and laid down as it suited you,” writes Durban, an Aiken, S.C., native who is author of the 1985 collection of stories, “All Set About With Fever Trees.” She teaches at Georgia State University.

Upon hearing the news, Annie, ever her father’s daughter, does the principled thing and drops her life in exile in Pennsylvania, returns to Timmons and takes up the role of dutiful daughter.

In her effort to bolster Louise Vess, Annie returns to the very things she rebelled against in her youth: engaging in social pleasantries, writing thank-you notes and putting on a brave front. But soon her refuge begins to feel like captivity in “a hot, windowless, stifling place where nothing comes in and nothing goes out, where the questions already have answers and all the conclusions are foregone.”

During her time at home, the inscrutable Annie becomes the errand girl for her emotionally volatile mother, the one to tend Papa’s grave, to act as a Scrabble and drinking partner on Friday nights, and the one to uncover the harsh, unvarnished truth about John Vess’ character.

Durban captures the cadences and contents of small-town Southspeak circa 1980, when the novel is set (and of today, for that matter), in which what goes unsaid can be the most important thing.

Annie drops in on Thelma Radford to confront her father’s longtime secretary about the affair she’s convinced they had. But once inside the woman’s tacky, nouveau-rich home, Annie cannot bring herself to muster an accusation--even though the woman has received a sizable sum rightfully belonging to Louise Vess.

But a slip of Thelma’s tongue--allowing as how John Vess worried about his daughter night and day--spills the truth.

The lawyer’s daughter pounces on the detail: “You say he talked about me night and day.”

“(Thelma) had been about to go on, I could tell,” Durban writes. “Then her mouth snapped shut and the wariness came back into her eyes. ‘That’s what I said. Night and day.’ ”

With the lyricism and delicate detail of Jill McCorkle, Durban soars even higher in her depiction of Annie’s mother, the regal Southern lady who cannot hide her emotions, try as she might, and for whom the stiff upper lip has gained upper hand.

“Like other women with large energies confined to narrow channels, she became vehement and fierce. Everything we did mattered too much; everything became a challenge, a fight.”

Unfortunately, this exquisite character collapses after undergoing an improbable conversion to fundamentalist Christianity that feels more like a writerly construct than organic character development.

In the end, the book suffers from the same malady that vexed Annie Vess in her mother’s home. The questions all have answers and the conclusions are all foregone. Annie’s recovery from the twin deaths of her father and husband is too quick and easy, the season of grief too short. And her new life with her new love in the old farmhouse bought with inherited money comes together too rapidly to be convincing.

Nonetheless, Durban’s large talent and her rivers of lapidary prose make “The Laughing Place” a must-read for anyone plumbing the deep, treacherous waters of the mother-daughter bond.