Lives in the Flow

By John Skow

MACHINE DREAMS

by Jayne Anne Phillips Dutton; 331 pages; $16.95

A novelist can describe time's flow past a few more bends in the river, nothing more. And nothing less: seen well, the currents and eddies that quicken, disappear and roil to the surface again during two generations of an ordinary family's journey are astonishing and mysterious. Fat-legged baby becomes child, becomes maiden, becomes mother, becomes crone. Which is real? Blink twice; the young hell raiser reappears as the sour pensioner. Which is illusion, hot sexuality or bitter recollection?

Jayne Anne Phillips' wondering, musing first novel raises such questions without ever explicitly stating them, in a way that suggests another fine family por trait, last year's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase. In a man ner that seems simple and straightforward, though its workings are intricate enough, the author sketches the histories of four people in Bellington, a town she places in West Virginia. They are Mitch Hampson, born in 1910, a soldier, heavy-equipment operator, scrambling business man; his wife Jean, born in the mid-'20s, deeper and more complex than Mitch; and their daughter Danner and son Billy, born in 1949 and 1950. Nothing extraordinary happens to any of them. Jean and Mitch hold their not very companionable marriage together until the children are grown, then get divorced. Danner be comes a pretty, tense, scholarly young woman. Billy is open and decent, on the way to becoming a steady, useful man. He is drafted and sent to Viet Nam, and Danner and their parents stay home and worry.

So goes this plain tale. The fascination is in the telling. Jean, Mitch and their children present their first-person stories alternately, and the hastening tumble of years can be read in the chapter headings: "War Letters: Mitch, 1942-45," "Anniversary Song: Jean, 1948," "War Letters: Billy, 1970." "All those winters the family stayed put, just ate food they'd dried or put up in pantries, and venison the old man shot. They kept one path shoveled through the snow to the barn, and the walls of the path were as high as a man's shoulders. I know all this because I heard about it, growing up," says Mitch of his early childhood. "I was too small to remember, really. Just a few things." This is a simple man remembering simple things, and the author is convincing, speaking in a male voice. But the chapters are not merely testimony; the writer's own narration takes over, and memory and present time wash in and out. Now and then -- always sparingly, and never with the self-indulgence common to word-drunk young novelists -- the images thicken to a rich impressionism. Danner, at seven, falling asleep and hearing the half-understood noises of her parents' lovemaking, fantasizes about horses that "are dark like blood and gleam with a black sheen; the animals swim hard in the air to get higher, and Danner aches to stay with them ... In the dream it is the horse pressed against her, the rhythmic pumping of the forelegs as the animal climbs, the lather and the smell; the smell that comes in waves and pounds inside her like a pulse."

The reader is never abandoned in such flights. Phillips (author of Black Tickets, a much praised volume of short stories) expresses herself in all four voices with clarity and grace: these lives matter, and this is why they matter. It is a statement that authors and their audiences once took for granted -- otherwise, why write or read? -- but one that few novelists now at work have managed to make so persuasively.