[In the following review, Armstrong lauds Godwin's Father Melancholy's Daughter.]

Early in Gail Godwin's new novel [Father Melancholy's Daughter], Daddy, the "Father Melancholy," of the title, Episcopal Rector of St Cuthbert's and its contracting Virginian congregation of the early 1970s, holds hands with his guest and family to say Grace at dinner. The reaction of incredulous cynicism from his wife's friend, Madelyn, his wife Ruth's embarrassment, his six-year-old only daughter's fury at the sophisticated stranger's intrusion, and Daddy's always slightly exasperating goodness, are caught in the unassuming virtuosity of Godwin's writing. A complex interaction between the members of this linked circle is registered in the briefest of episodes.

The making, breaking and re-making of relationships among these characters form the inner circle of this narrative. It is as subtly restricted by the boundaries of a small-town Southern church and its parishioners as the life of Margaret, daughter of the depressive Rector, is circumscribed by her duty to him. The efforts of father and daughter to understand Ruth's betrayal of them after she has been carried away by Madelyn, a director of blasphemous avant-garde plays in New York, is the main theme of the book. Their obsession is the more poignant because it takes place among the mild, recurrent and often comic details of parish life: in the responses to Psalm 118, "Some voices sounded more convinced than others. During the beat of silence between the verses, Miriam Stacy's sinuses began to drain."

Godwin has always been fascinated by "unrequited daughters": daughters, that is, growing up without one or both parents; and their attempt to compensate for the incompleteness or one-sidedness of the family becomes the dynamic of her plots. Here, both father and daughter, locked into dependence, are forced into an addictive hermeneutics of the past. The exhaustive search for explanation becomes compulsive. Narrative tension builds up because the facts of Ruth's desertion, her mysterious source of income, her death in a care crash in England, and Madelyn's true relation to her, continue to be discovered right up to the end of the book.

The novel closes where it begins, repeating the idea of the circle, as we realize that it is actually the daughter, Margaret's, autobiography, still in the act of being written. Yet because the "novel" is still being written, the satisfyingly shaped closure of the story—containing a number of surprises—actually opens out Margaret's life again. She stops being a voyeur of her past. In an arresting memory of avid curiosity she recognizes her double in a strange woman churchgoer she once found trespassing, searching the closet for secrets.

Is she liberated by the death of her father? He, overwhelmed by local politics and struggles against a property developer, dies of a heart attack in the act of reconsecrating a vandalized statue of Christ. But while she ironizes and exposes the tensions of the father-daughter relationship. Godwin never offers an easy oedipal judgment. Indeed, superficial Freudianizing is covertly criticized. The relationship, despite its classic psychoanalytical features, is nourishing.

It is this scrupulousness, perhaps, which enables the book to be mystery story, domestic fiction and religious novel all at once. The narrative takes in different genres, just as it approaches sex, worship, cooking, reading a book and dressing, with immediacy and delicacy of detail. The same honesty pits simpler "Southern" values against New York sophistication—against Madelyn's aggressive theatrical travesty, Pas de Dieux, or against a wildly bizarre telephone quiz, offering phantasmal Buicks and sapphire pendants, which is described with a mixture of hysteria and hilarity at the moment of Father Melancholy's death. At the same time, the novel recognizes Southern conservatism and the sheer tedium of being the Rector's daughter. "Do-gooder Dishes…. Sanctimonious Cuisine", she mutters, throwing out a decade's worth of foil cartons, relics of a congregation's goodwill.

Skilfully written, accessible, funny, discriminating, Gail Godwin's novels are unusual in being readable and thoughtful. But her publishers need to be more efficient. At the time of writing this is the only one of her novels which is currently available in Britain.