Sister Act

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

TITLE: THE FOURTEEN SISTERS OF EMILIO MONTEZ O'BRIEN

AUTHOR: OSCAR HIJUELOS

PUBLISHER: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 484 PAGES; $22

THE BOTTOM LINE: Elegantly written, but don't look for this male's-eye view of women on a feminist's bookshelf.

Oscar Hijuelos is a master when it comes to writing hard-muscled, virile novels. His second book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, a lusty tale of two Cuban immigrant brothers making their way as musicians in New York City during the 1950s, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize three years ago, making him the first Latino novelist so honored. But this time out, Hijuelos has decided to tell his story through a woman's eyes. Make that 14 women's eyes. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien is the title of his latest novel, and the book oozes with femininity -- or at least with Hijuelos' version of it.

Fourteen Sisters tells the story of the family of Nelson O'Brien, an Irish immigrant to the U.S. who travels to Cuba as a photographer during the Spanish-American War. There he falls passionately in love and marries the young and beautiful Mariela Montez. After the couple returns to the farm O'Brien owns in a small Pennsylvania town, he works as the local photographer and operates the community's movie theater, while she keeps busy bearing and rearing their 14 daughters and, finally, one son, Emilio Montez O'Brien.

This is a big and ambitious book whose events span a century, and right at the beginning Hijuelos announces his intention to take his time telling it. "A lot of people wrongly discount the quality of photographs produced by the type of camera I use," Nelson O'Brien tells his son Emilio in the quote that opens the book. "But this apparatus, in my opinion, captures not only the superficial qualities of its subjects but also, because of the time it takes to properly collect light, their feelings, as they settle on the subjects' expressions; sadness and joy and worry, with variations therein, are collected on the plate."

Hijuelos creates a series of vibrant snapshots from the lives of different members of the Montez O'Brien clan, all rendered in the writer's exquisitely sensuous prose. The sisters are the title characters of the book, and there is much female activity, including cooking, childbearing and lovemaking, but Hijuelos is much too macho a writer to surrender himself entirely to a feminine -- don't even think about feminist -- world. Thus a big chunk of the book focuses on brother Emilio's exploits as he fights in Italy during World War II, beds his way through postwar Greenwich Village, beats the odds in Hollywood, where he plays Tarzan and Sam Spade-style detectives in B movies, and eventually gains fame as a celebrity photographer.

The sisters' lives are far less developed, partly because there are so many of them but also because of Hijuelos' attitude toward females. Women, he writes, are "delegated to the comforting of men before the storm that would be their lives." Indeed, the most constantly recurring image in the book is of women suckling men. The fate of the sisters is determined and defined primarily by their relationships with men. Even Margarita, the oldest and most independent of them, achieves lasting contentment only when at 90 she marries an elderly but still "strapping" former pilot and finds herself "feeling the ancient pride of a woman satisfying her man."

Reading The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien is like leafing through the pages of a treasured family album. Many of the pictures evoke warm memories, but some, alas, are faded and out of date.