The thick blood of the South

IN his latest novel, Dennis McFarland (“Singing Boy,” “Prince Edward”) again displays his knack for eloquent subtlety. “Letter From Point Clear” takes on religion, family dysfunction and gay marriage, among other issues, but not in a didactic way.

After the death of their father (“drunken, narcissistic, and not especially interested in his children”), the Owens siblings come together at the family home in Point Clear, Ala., for complicated reasons. Ellen, a middle-aged poet, has been living in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, Dan, and their 13-year-old son, Willie, but she’s recently separated from Dan because “a little break from each other might spark a needed change.” Morris, a university professor, lives near her, in Brookline, with Richard, his partner of 14 years. And Bonnie, perpetually troubled, drug-addled and at 30 the youngest (their mother died giving birth to her), is already ensconced in Point Clear, having abandoned an unsuccessful acting career in New York to move back home and care for their ailing father.

Yet once he dies, she doesn’t return to New York. A letter to Ellen tells why: Bonnie has married a local preacher with the unlikely name of Pastor Vandorpe. “You and Morris have always looked at me and my life as a kind of train wreck,” she writes. Afraid of Pastor’s reaction to Morris’ domestic arrangement, she didn’t invite her siblings to the wedding. Ellen and Morris decide to head home to Point Clear in an effort to save their sister -- from what they’re not quite sure.

Contemplating the dreaded trip, Morris muses on what he hates about the South, like its vaunted hospitality, “a kit of manners that included a knife for backstabbing.” Equally repellent is “a growing body of lightweight literature that portrayed the South as chock-full of characters who couldn’t be more colorful if they tried, who never uttered a phrase that wasn’t picturesque, and who, despite. . . their bigotries, were good-hearted folks through and through.” He girds himself for the visit with thoughts of “racism, homophobia, unwholesome cuisine, and pandemic bad taste.” If Ellen and Bonnie are often so earnest as to be almost unlikable, Morris is refreshingly acerbic; his blunt, unsentimental voice gives the novel a welcome dose of humor.

Complicating the visit is the fact that Morris and Ellen might like to sell the family home. But Bonnie (now pregnant) and Pastor are living there, and the two older sibs can’t help wondering if Pastor is after the family’s wealth. McFarland knows better than to make Pastor a one-dimensional, gold-digging evangelical Christian. He’s charismatic, handsome and weirdly endearing, and he gives Bonnie the sense of stability she craves.

The scenes between Morris and Pastor are the novel’s richest fodder. The pious preacher is kind to Morris, but, as Bonnie tells Ellen, “[h]e can annihilate you with kindness and affection. He can assassinate, exterminate, and hang you out to dry with it.” Indeed, just as he’s reaching out to his new brother-in-law, Pastor summons an emergency “Prayer Team” to cure him of “the sin of homosexuality.” Strained encounters and small gestures of forgiveness abound in “Letter From Point Clear,” a tale in which one minor crisis -- of faith, familial love and other domestic or spiritual matters -- follows another. Yet don’t expect anyone to emerge radically transformed, much less saved, by the end. Morris (thankfully) shakes things up. It’s his nature: “Do you ever walk into a room and everything’s just so perfect, you feel an urge to put something out of place?” he asks Ellen.

Much as in the graceful fiction of Anne Tyler, “Letter From Point Clear” explores the ways in which the characters come to terms with their lives instead of embarking on new ones. These are people who shun melodrama in favor of safety and whatever degree of comfort they can find. Thus McFarland tends to underplay their various confrontations, to keep these from being heavy-handed. At times, though, his readers may long for the tension to be kicked up just one more notch.

Carmela Ciuraru is the editor, most recently, of “Fatherhood Poems.”