BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Soap Opera Cloaks Premise of Near-Mythic Proportions : THE TRACK OF REAL DESIRES <i> by Beverly Lowry</i> ; Knopf; $21, 220 pages

“Connections were what people long for, a sense of what was going on,” writes Beverly Lowry of one character in her latest novel, “The Track of Real Desires.” “Hers was a talent for compression, isolation and choice. Chuck out the chaff, fix on the wheat; forget the general picture and eyeball details.”

With these few words, Lowry has described herself and her own powers as a storyteller. She needs only a couple hundred pages to give us the tale of a woman named Leland Standard and her sentimental journey to the little town of Eunola in the Mississippi Delta where she grew up. But Lowry manages to make every connection that counts, and her eye falls on every telling detail.

Lee has been pursuing her career as a dancer on both coasts, New York and Los Angeles, and now she returns with her adolescent son, Toby, on a sentimental journey to Eunola. What she finds, after an absence of 35 years or so, is a strange new world, a kind of torqued and twisted version of the New South.

Nowadays, when an aging belle goes on an eating binge, she gobbles garlic bagel chips. The elderly widow who operates the switchboard at the local nursing home has figured out how to apply for government grants to acquire a battery of high-tech communications equipment. And a failed cotton grower who bungles an attempt at suicide writes a successful book about it: “How to Lose Your Farm and Hold On to Your Life.”

“Mississippi had a film commission,” observes Lowry. “Farmers were growing funny lettuce. The yellow pages had to put in a new classification for consultancies. People made it up as they went, working in their homes at their PCs and printers and answering and recording and fax machines.”

The return of the prodigal daughter prompts a frenzy of self-assessment and self-revelation among her old friends in Eunola, and Lowry--a master of the private moment, the secret thought, the overheard conversation--rings all the changes on the plight of women who are “facing the gynecological end of the line” and fighting fiercely to stay fully alive.

For example, we meet Melanie Farrish, a woman with a defeated husband, a weirded-out son, an ill-mannered dog named Lady MacBeth, and a daughter who killed herself at 15.

“Her left eye twitched. What was it this time--Xanax, Prozac, or plain old Popov? She was supposed to be off everything, though with Mell you never knew.”

Then there’s the former Mildred Sissy Pruett, now Sissy Westerfield, once voted “Most Talented” as a flirtatious young woman, now content to cinch up her ample flesh in cleverly engineered undergarments from Victoria’s Secret and admire herself in the mirror in a literally carnal way.

“You are F-period-A-period-T,” she scolds herself. But when she finishes with a private moment of self-love and dresses herself up in silk, Sissy is content with what she beholds: “Eat your heart out, Leland Standard,” she declares. “Eat out your fit, skinny L.A. heart.”

And we meet Jane Scott Laws, also known as “Jane Slut Laws” by her lover’s wife. Jane returned to Eunola after a “lesbian fling” in San Francisco and took up the pursuit of married men in general and one married man, nicknamed Dog, in particular.

“Traditionally, the way to get by in the Delta was to drink hard and hold on to your eccentricities,” writes Lowry. “Jane Scott was working at both.”

All of these women, plus an assortment of male consorts and miscellaneous children, gather for the dinner party that becomes the set piece of Lowry’s book: “A general evening-up of whatever scores of whichever old and lost games were being played and kept.” Slowly, agonizingly, dangerously but deliciously, each secret struggles to reveal itself--and sometimes with shattering consequences.

The intimate secrets of Lee Standard and her son and her friends, which I shall not reveal here, are the standard elements of soap opera: abortion, infidelity, illegitimate birth, various kinds of illness, and various permutations of human sexuality. But there’s something almost mythic in the premise of Lowry’s book, something that is both deeply familiar and profoundly disturbing, and that’s what makes “The Track of Real Desires” such a memorable and even haunting book.