The Ventriloquist : CLOUD CHAMBER.<i> By Michael Dorris</i> .<i> Scribner: 316 pp., $24</i>

Michael Dorris’ new novel, “Cloud Chamber,” confirms everything I suspected after reading “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water”: that he is one of the true masters of voice, of character and of storytelling in contemporary American literature. As comfortable in the voice of a consumptive teenage girl as he is in the voice of a black waiter in a German officers’ club, as at home with the Irish landscape as he is with rural Kentucky and Montana’s Great Plains, Dorris weaves five generations, at least that many ethnicities and three times that many locales into a cohesive and satisfying narrative--made all the more satisfying by its vastness and scope.

“Cloud Chamber” is a novel that begins in a pub in turn-of-the-century Ireland and ends up in a Kentucky Fried Chicken near Harve, Mont. Dorris moves the narrative from generation to generation and from place to place as smoothly and effortlessly as if he had a time machine. Each narrator’s voice (there are eight in all) remains utterly distinct from the others’, most of them quite lovable, a few a little horrifying, each one fascinating, sympathetic and true.

The story opens in the voice of Rose Mannion, a fiery black-haired young woman from Roscommon County, Ireland, who fights on the side of the nationalists and calls herself a force to behold. Her mother dead from an English soldier’s stray bullet, her father and brothers arrested before they can exact revenge, Rose falls in love with a leader in the movement called Gerry Lynch, and when he admits to her that he’s a traitor, working on the side of the English, she makes love to him for hours, the next day gives him up to the nationalists, watches him hang and has a table made from the branch on which he hung.

That’s just the first chapter, and in the chapters that follow, we hear the voices of all those whose lives Rose touches, all the lives she ruins to make up for the sadness in her own. First is Martin, the man Rose forces to marry her and take her away from Ireland and to Kentucky. Next is their son Robert, who marries a woman so like Rose that his only chance for escape is to get beaten so badly he loses his memory and then gets consumption (“I was being consumed,” he says). Then Robert’s wife Bridie speaks, and we hear about her plan to destroy him by the inconsistent denial of affection, making him settle each day for a little bit less.

Each of these characters, all of these places, come to life in the lovely precision of Dorris’ prose. Rose describes Gerry Lynch in her door-frame--the stand of sunlight hair, the wild growth of reeds in a windstorm--and later, when she reveals Gerry’s secret, Martin describes her: Her witness was unwilling, scraped out of her like a clam from its shell. Her pain was a living thing, embarrassing in its nakedness. When Bridie discusses her decision to marry Robert even though she is in love with his brother Andrew, the priest, she says of herself: “I would in 10 years find myself mired in a droning job, a woman forced to take pride in her appearance since no one else did, a woman who talked about her success with African violets, a woman standoffish, odd, furious. Alone with her secret memories.”

Bridie’s daughters, Marcella and Edna, take the story from there into the middle of the 20th century, into a racist South and into sanatoriums, into convents and abortion clinics. They are as different, these two sisters, as their parents were from each other. Marcella lies on the sanatorium sun porch in her quilted satin robe flirting with the delivery boy and making a list called “Why I Am Nevertheless a Fortunate Person,” while Edna faces her illness dead on and flirts only with the idea of a vocation. But by the thick and rich middle of “Cloud Chamber,” these sisters manage to come together in a way their parents and grandparents could never have hoped to, and with their love for life and each other they begin to turn their legacy of anger and hatred around.

Marcella and Edna pass the narrative on to Elgin, Marcella’s only son, and he passes it on to Rayona, his only daughter, where it comes to rest five generations from where it started, near Harve, Mont., where part-black, part-Indian Rayona is about to take her Irish great-grandmother Rose’s name, in a tribal naming ceremony that by her Aunt Ida’s design breaks all the traditional rules.

Anyone who loved “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water” will be delighted by Ida and Rayona’s return at the end of “Cloud Chamber.” Rayona is back and better than ever, and Dorris outdoes himself with her voice, which is precisely the right combination of hope and humor, of streetwise sarcasm and against-all-odds optimism, of a die-hard desire--intoxicating, free.

“The mountains are blue dreams, in a row of sideways right angles at the edge of the valley. The air smells green and yellow, and the only sound is the eight little wheels beneath me, whirling on their new Singapore bearings, standing at the asphalt. The sun is behind me so my shadow goes ahead, leading the way, and in a shadow I look good--graceful and long, bigger than myself, a shifting pattern on the grayness of the road. In shadow I could be anybody, fill-in-the-blank-anybody. In shadow I’m the dancing, flickering image of an overhead cloud whizzing across the lane, going anywhere fast, wherever the wind blows.”

The characters in “Cloud Chamber” rise by degrees, each generation a little more free from the bitterness of the past, and though Rayona’s life is no easier than Rose’s, no freer of tragedy and pain, she has inside her every good thing her rainbow coalition of relatives has passed down to her, and in spite of everything, Rayona is going to be OK.

In “Cloud Chamber,” Dorris tells the American story of hard people leading difficult lives with as much courage, insight and allowance for complexity as anyone writing today. And when he turns those lives away from the darkness and toward all that is joyful, all that is redemptive, he does it so deftly, so softly and yet so completely that I am left speechless, cheering and crying at the same time.