It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels : BREAK THE HEART OF ME, <i> By Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday: $20; 289 pp.)</i>

Familiarity breeds contempt, to say nothing of nausea. The daily atrocities of talk TV become ho-hum. Notions that ought to disturb or even horrify us--sexual abuse, death from disease and suicide, religious fanaticism, bulimia, marital strife--induce little more ennui. Snore City: another dysfunctional family, another four or five souls shrieking in despair.

But novelist/creating writing teacher Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn’s “Break the Heart of Me” is no mike-in-your-face presentation of all-American schmutz. Rather, it is a complex fiction that, ultimately, is more authentic than the televised truth that deadens our souls. There is no way we can keep our usual snooty distance from its brave and splendid narrator, hymn-singing country girl Sylvia Grace Mullins. She has suffered long--and cruelly.

Her travails begin before she is born, when her pregnant, 14-year-old mother falls into a coma after a car accident. After two months on life-support, her mother passes from the world at the time Sylvia comes into it. At age 12, Sylvia loses the beloved grandmother who raised her. With her cancer-riddled grandfather, Paw Paw, she is taken to Nashville by her father and step-mother. Soon after, she must also bear the loss of her first love, Bo Schifflett, Jr., an evangelical Christian who is convinced the Rapture is at hand. Bo is not your rockin’, rolling’, run-of-the-mill, teen heart-throb. There is no song in Bo’s heart:

“(Bo) said the days of Tribulation were coming and the Communists were going to take over and they were going to burn all of our Bibles and make us read the Communist Manifesto, and they were going to turn our churches into Communist training grounds and brainwash our children . . . and we have to have the Bibles memorized so that when they burn them all up we could come back together and write it back down.

“I started getting this panic spell, and I said Bo, couldn’t we just hide some.”

In a scene all the more horrifying because it is recounted by the low-key Sylvia, the fanatical Bo offers up his life (in a most grisly manner) to the imminent God who, Bo knows, will save him. God, apparently, has other ideas.

Sylvia has to bear hurts more damaging than death. The name Paw Paw ought to belong to a lovable old Southern curmudgeon, but in fact the man is a monster who has abused her for years. Vaughn endows her narrator with the skill to recount the abuse so simply, yet in such a sickening, detailed and erotic manner, that the reader shares the torment Sylvia suffers. Her agony is not only due to physical pain or to mortification that the “medicine” her grandfather is giving her must be kept secret from her grandmother. That would be terrible enough, but added to that burden is the conflict between the enormity of Paw Paw’s betrayal and Sylvia’s own normal, suppressed sensual desires.

When at last she enters womanhood, there in no Prince Charming waiting to deliver her from drabness. At 23, Sylvia has virtually no magic in her life. No music either, even though she works as a secretary in the Sony entertainment empire. Her husband, 40-year-old Buddy, is not exactly a prince of a guy, appearing utterly satisfied being a traveling salesman of dry-walling and timber products. While she yearns to transcend what she sees as her ordinariness and to make music, to play her drums in a real band, write beautiful, heart-breaking songs she can record, all Buddy dreams of is a couple of cold beers. Sylvia observes:

“All his clothes smell like smoke. Somtimes Buddy’s clothes, wrinkled pants with a 48-inch waist and a worn seat drenched in the state odor of old cigarettes--it’s just gross. I don’t even like to wash our clothes in the same load.”

Besides being massively unattractive, Buddy is also monumentally insensitive. When Sylvia tells him of her newly-surfaced memory of abuse, his only comments are “Well, what do you want me to do about it” and “Christ.”

Given this lack of plain old humanity, it is no wonder that Sylvia finds herself falling for Jake Harris, a sympathetic, good-looking country singer and composer with a recording contract who is poised to leap from simple recognition to out-and-out celebrity.

Jake would seem to be everything she wants in a man: courteous, responsive to her musical gift as well as to the potential pleasures of her flesh. He also arrives at either the best or the worst moment, when Sylvia finds herself coming apart as she tries to deal with her nightmare of a childhood--being a victim of traumatic loss, incest, religious fanaticism--as well as living in a joyless marriage. For Sylvia, however, cheating on Buddy (even with so dandy a dude as Jake) does not come easy. In her world, adultery is not mere “fooling around.” It is an act with moral dimensions and with consequences. She can never be a detached 1990s dame with a handful of condoms in her pocketbook who cool-headedly weighs the credits and debits of any man she finds appealing. Her honesty makes her supremely vulnerable.

Because Sylvia is depicted with such authenticity, the reader is involved with her to the point of identification: It becomes vital to know what will become of her. Is Jake to be trusted? Could she possibly go back to Buddy? And can she ever, truly, transcend her past and find some music?

A writer as accomplished as Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn (her first novel, “Many Things Have Happened Since He Died,” was acclaimed for its artistry) should be able to create a universe so compelling, so richly textured, so full of unanswered questions that the reader should find his or her own world flat in comparison. Yet too often in “Break the Heart of Me,” Vaughn stops playing God in her authorial cosmos and, instead, assumes human form--cloaked in the robes of creative writing teacher.

It is here that the writing becomes unconvincing. Sylvia is silenced and her Bible-Belt world is suddenly observed by an academic who appears to be always conscious of language, and of points to be gained by intellectual virtuosity. One example: It is not our much-loved narrator who goes on about fertilizing tulip and daffodil bulbs with bone. The author herself, aware of death imagery, breaks the mood she herself creates:

“I felt my bones turning into meal and I feel (Jake) ossify in my hand and I wonder if I really want to plant bones in my yard, like I live in a graveyard.”

Ossify? This sort of reflection is far more literary and self-conscious than an intelligent but down-to-earth woman like Sylvia would ever be--or would want to be.

So the novel isn’t perfect. Big deal. In the long run, “Break the Heart of Me” is such an impressive work of fiction that its occasional lapses into “creative writing” cannot diminish its power. With amazing grace, Vaughn’s story engages the mind--even as its narrator captivates the heart.