Vanished Lives : Writer traces the lives of his white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant ancestors through 2 centuries : FAMILY, <i> By Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $23; 386 pp.)</i>

Ian Frazier immediately conveys the theme of his powerful new book, “Family,” in a prefatory quote from Thomas Wolfe’s novel, “Look Homeward, Angel”:

We can believe in the nothingness of life,

we can believe in the nothingness of death

and of life after death--but who can

believe in the nothingness of Ben?

Frazier’s “Family” affirms the somethingness of the vanished lives of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant ancestors throughout 200 years of American history. He substantiates their existence by skillfully narrating their stories in a vigorous, vernacular style, from which evocative similes often effortlessly arise: “When we studied glaciers in an Ohio history class in grade school, I imagined our glacier receding smoothly, like a sheet pulled off a new car.” And, “My father used to lie awake at night by the hour. I knew that if I knocked on (my parents’) bedroom door at three in the morning his voice would answer immediately, unblurred by sleep, level as water.”

Occasionally, his similes don’t work: “Bees fumbled in the wildflowers like thumbs.” Or “ . . . sometimes a flock of gulls billows above the community like a bedsheet.”

By and large, Frazier’s voice--his plain American speech--unifies the diverse elements of his sprawling chronicle. Taken together, his compilation of personal experiences, memories, history, interviews, lists, letters and diaries make up an epic narrative of the development and attenuation of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, rural, educated, middle-class American civilization. Frazier is the last of his line to be born and raised in Ohio.

He was awakened to his creative task by his parents’ deaths within a few years of each other: “I wanted my parents’ lives to have meant something. I hunted all over for meanings of any kind . . . the stuff they saved implied that there must have been a reason for saving it. The smell of an old hymnal, the weave of a black mesh hat veil, the tone of a thank-you note, each struck me with the silent force of a clue. . . . I didn’t care if (their) meanings were far-flung or vague or even trivial. I wanted to pursue them. I hoped maybe I could find a meaning that would defeat death.”

Encompassed, like the Psalmist, by the sorrow of death, Frazier sought solace by the exercise of his abundant gifts as a writer. His forebears would have turned to Jesus Christ. “Compared to them,” he says. “I suppose I am an infidel.” They were almost all devout Protestants--Frazier calls them “frontier Calvinists”--who were obsessed by the state of their souls. “They prayed out loud, cited Scripture in conversation.” The King James Bible was an essential component of their culture: “A person who moved fast they might say was ‘going like Jehu,’ from Jehu, a King of Israel, the fastest driver in the Bible (11 Kings, 9:20), whose chariot a watchman could identify in the far distance from the tower of Jerusalem: ‘The driving is like the driving of Jehu . . . for he driveth furiously.’ ”

Some were church members of the Disciples of Christ, a Protestant sect founded in the 1820s, which was opposed to “church hierarchies, forms of worship not mentioned in the New Testament, and all statements of creed. . . .” Their ideas made sense to lots of people; hundreds of thousands joined them, creating one of the largest indigenous religious movements in American history. They believed America was the Promised Land given them by God; they wanted to build a New Jerusalem here.

Frazier gives us glimpses of their rich inner lives with details taken from family diaries and letters--lovely examples of American prose. This is from a letter written in an Ohio farmhouse in 1868: “ . . . evening and children all in bed, and for two or three hours I can think and know what I am about.”

But Frazier never romanticizes his ancestors. He says right out that some were in the slave trade, and others owned slaves. None liked Catholics and Jews.

Frazier’s people, who settled in the Carolinas and New England before the Revolution, moved west early on; he paints a vivid word-picture of frontier Ohio, with its immense, dark forests filled with gigantic trees, its one-room cabins and smoky taverns, in which the coffee was “a libel on diluted soot.”

Ohio, for Frazier, is an American state of mind. Family is permeated with its landscape: the light, clouds, trees, birds and animals. Norwalk, Ohio, which was founded by Frazier’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, is the living heart of his book. He lovingly re-create 19th- and 20th-Century small town life there--secure and comfortable, rooted in extended familial relationships. Lucy Preston Wickham fed 75 relatives at her Christmas dinners. “ . . . she cared for her grandfather Taylor until he died at age ninety-six . . . she proofread the (family owned newspaper) and sometimes wrote editorials . . . she learned sign language to talk to a (deaf and mute) woman who sewed for her.”

The family’s Edenic existence was interrupted by the Civil War, in which almost all its male members fought. Frazier focuses on their historic confrontation with violent death: “Will Wickham ‘drifted’ across a half mile of open field and was about to enter some woods when he stopped to watch a group of artillerymen trying to free a brass howitzer from a ditch. Suddenly he heard a sound like a smart slap on the face and turned to see a soldier standing erect as if at attention with a hole through his forehead the size of a half-dollar. . . .”

Frazier’s consciousness of death shapes “Family.” His sensitivity is accompanied by a writer’s most important gift: He makes readers feel for his characters. We’re sad when his younger brother Fritz dies at 15 of leukemia. And when his father, David, dies from Alzheimer’s and Peggy, his mother, from liver cancer, we take it hard because we’ve gotten to know and like them.

In a way, David Frazier’s suffering outlived him; among the diaries and letters and notes to himself that he left behind is “a piece of yellow note-paper” with the following written on it in his “shaky, latter-day printing:”

DEPRESSION

ANXIETIE

ANXIITY

ANXIETY DEPRESSION

ANXITY

Frazier’s “Family” is hard to put down. He structures his narrative in both a lineal and thematic way. He occasionally jumps around in time, while developing individual stories, but they all compel the reader’s attention.

Frazier eulogizes his beloved dead, all his progenitors. He mourns the passing of their uniquely American way of life and religious sensibility, which helped form our national consciousness. He laments the death of God within himself. The presence or absence of God in our lives is a major theme of our classical writers, from Jonathan Edwards to Ernest Hemingway. Ian Frazier’s “Family” is a deeply moving book in a great American literary tradition.