Some Pride, More Prejudice : FICTION : SOUTHERN EXPOSURE,<i> By Alice Adams (Alfred A. Knopf. $23; 305 pp.)</i>

In her ninth novel, “Southern Exposure,” Alice Adams returns to the landscape of her childhood after recent books set in California and Mexico. The South is a strong presence--almost a character--in this nuanced, nostalgic but not uncritical novel of manners set in the late 1930s and early ‘40s.

Connecticut refugees Cynthia and Harry Baird and their precocious daughter, Abigail, are abandoning stale Yankee dreams and moving to Pinehill, N. C., to start a new life with new friends in what they imagine to be a warm, wide-open climate. Soon after they arrive, the Baird family is welcomed into the small, white, circumspect college community where people watch each other drive back and forth to town.

“At the Bigelows’ party, that hot September Sunday, the guests were all such very old friends and had been to so many parties together that it hardly mattered anymore who spoke what lines, anything uttered by anyone could well have been said by another person. Even the presence of the new Yankees, the Bairds, and the stray comments that their stylish presence occasioned did not radically alter the general tone.”

Among the guests is Jimmy Hightower, an Oklahoma oil tycoon who has settled in Pinehill to write a blockbuster novel. Cynthia Baird is attracted to this other outsider as well as to the host, Dolly Bigelow, who in time becomes Cynthia’s close friend and business partner. Missing from the party are Pinehill’s famous, elusive poet, Russ Byrd, his tormented wife, SallyJane, and their five children.

The role of poet--absent and present, metaphor, projection, embodied person--is central here. Ursula, a new friend of Russ’s, travels from Kansas to tend his family; both Cynthia Baird and Jimmy Hightower move to Pinehill in order to bask in Byrd’s literary light. Everywhere the celebrated writer elicits artistic, erotic, intellectual fantasies. Meanwhile, Byrd rewrites lives gathered around him, renaming his wife Brett and putting Ursula into a play.

Russ Byrd’s hubris recalls other scoundrel poets and, like Nur in Anita Desai’s wicked “In Custody,” Russ loses his aesthetic edge in a haze of groupie adulation, alcohol and sex. He imagines his mistress moving in with his large family. “Between them the women could get the household work done and keep the children quiet and happy. They could just forget about romance and love. And he would only think in terms of his work. He could write all day, and maybe at night he would read them bits of what he had done.”

Eventually the newcomer Bairds meet Mr. Poetic Legend and become oddly entangled with his family. Adams’ plot is fainter than her sketches of character and setting. The story line meanders through Russ and SallyJane’s marriage, SallyJane’s loss of sanity and a romantic mystery about Russ’s beautiful mistress, Deirdre, who lives with a much younger “brother,” strikingly resembling Russ. Jimmy Hightower waffles over his literary ambitions and the Bairds debate about whether they are Yankees or Southerners. The curious perspectives of the foreign Bairds and Hightowers admit interesting Southern exposures throughout the novel. Cynthia speculates that her female neighbors are just like other women, “only more so?”

The truly meaningful in Pinehill is not what happens but what people say about what happens. Gossip is gospel, and Adams skillfully paces her narrative with social conversations.

“ ‘If Russ isn’t plastered, Brett is for certain sure. You hear what she just now said about her name?’

“ ‘Well, high time for that, is what I say. How come she ever let Russ stick a new name on her in the first place. Like he was God, or at the very least her father?’ ”

Covetousness is a way of life in a small town where people fall in love with each other’s spouses as well as with their children, jobs, pedigrees and servants. Dolly Bigelow necks with neighbor Clifton Lee, Cynthia Baird and Jimmy Hightower flirt before they become “just friends,” . . . and so on.

A number of these trysts take place in the fecund Pinehill woods. Adams’ regional appreciation is always acute. “All the smells hang as rich as honey in the clear blue oxygen, thickening her breath, congealing in her lungs. No wonder everyone down here speaks and walks (it sometimes seems) so slowly, thinks Cynthia.”

Occasionally Adams loses focus, perhaps as she negotiates her proximity to the story. An odd historical voice intrudes, “In those pre-litigious days doctors were given the benefit of the doubt in most cases; it was not believed or perceived that they could grossly err.” On the other extreme, Adams seems unable to detach enough from the adolescent Abigail (who represents the author’s own generation) to fully imagine the character.

Still, “Southern Exposure” succeeds as an intricate, often surprising portrait of cultural collision. As Cynthia says, “For all our plans to sweep the town off its feet, it looks like that’s more what’s been done to us.” Reading this graceful, witty novel is like sitting in a comfortable parlor on a winter day, lapping up different shades and angles and degrees of sun as hours shift and neighbors drive in and out of each other’s lives.