FIRST FICTION

In the Hope of

Rising Again

Helen Scully

Penguin Press: 314 pp., $23.95

At first blush, Helen Scully’s exquisite debut -- a stirring melodrama about the Riant family of Mobile, Ala. -- is like one of those long-forgotten ladies’ novels of a bygone age, generally written by a Mrs. This or a Miss That: the kind of deliciously moldering relic you might find on the shelves of a gracious, if slightly reduced, old Southern home. Yet “In the Hope of Rising Again” is by no means merely a deftly executed genre exercise. Yes, the defenseless reader may swoon with each perfect sentence, as if felled by a blushing dose of Southern charm. But, as Scully traces the Catholic Riants from Reconstruction to the Great Depression, we come to realize that her rightful fictional forebears belong to a more rarefied Southern pantheon: Flannery O’Connor and James Agee, Tennessee Williams and Margaret Mitchell.

According to Southern tradition, Col. Riant, the indulgent patriarch, isn’t really a colonel at all. He is, however, a Confederate lieutenant who goes on to become publisher of the Mobile Chronicle. The Southern cause may have been lost at Appomattox, but Col. Riant wins security and luxury during the trying days of Reconstruction for his burgeoning family: a remote and stubborn wife named Regina; a quartet of flaneur-like sons who are interchangeable in their eccentricity and sloth; and daughter Regina, Scully’s heroine, who falls for a visitor from the East but goes on to marry the soulful, feckless Charles Morrow, a would-be lumber magnate.

All manner of rich tragedy ensues, and soon the Depression looms, an ominous cloud that is something like the return of Sherman’s March. The Riant manse burns and is rebuilt in jury-rigged splendor, the four boys decamp to find their dubious fortunes, and Regina is left alone with two daughters to preside, Scarlett O’Hara-style, over a once-masculine demesne. The life-sized dollhouse is taken apart for firewood, much of the help is let go, and lowly eggs replace the lavish repasts that inevitably concluded with charlotte russe.

On its way to becoming a refuge for an odd collection of spinsters and widows, the Riant household unfolds in stunning phrases. On the doomed Charles: “In his mind he crouches inside himself, knitting the tendrils of memory into a fist.” Of marital alienation: “a baffling substructure of the unknown towering over Charles and her.” This is Southern Gothic writ both large and small, with historic sweep and drawing-room intimacy; the delicate story of one Southern family forced by indelicate circumstance to rise anew.

*

The Preservationist

David Maine

St. Martin’s Press: 230 pp., $21.95

Boating can really bring a family together. Just ask Noe and his subservient wife and their three sons -- eldest Sem, a well-meaning daddy’s boy; Cham, the difficult middle child given to sass; and Japheth, the coddled baby of the family, a typical lazy teen. Of course, the family in question is no ordinary family, even though David Maine, in this sly fable, does his best to make them so. And their boat is no ordinary rig but a 300-by-50-cubit monster made of timber and pitch and intended to haul all of creation; in Cham’s words, “a floating barnyard.”

Yes, Capt. Noe and his crew are the familiar Noah et al. of Genesis, reconfigured here by Maine in a saga that is by turns hilarious and illuminating. Maine’s Noe is a hirsute 600-year-old who receives improbable directives from Yahweh, suffers the ridicule of his community and occasionally smacks his wife around. It’s as if Yahweh had mischievously selected the most emblematic human to restart the human race. Even so, Noe’s efforts are worthy of the pagan Atlas, as he carries the future on his aged shoulders and righteously -- perhaps too righteously -- leaves a corrupt humanity to be washed away. The world, he beams, as the ark sets uncertain sail, “had grown heavy with filth and weary with sin. Now it has been scrubbed clean.”

As our ancestors float on toward a godly tomorrow, they become awkwardly aware that they have much in common with the rutting fauna below decks. Maine’s storytelling is as human as it is divine, a sensitive overhaul of one of literature’s greatest adventures, one that young Japheth presciently calls “a Hell of a story to tell the grandkids.”