[In the following review, Pool argues that the series of “natural, social, and personal histories” portrayed in Natural History do not add up to a compelling whole.]

Anyone seeking to pinpoint the nature of the contemporary novel will have a rough time of it. Wearing old-fashioned stays, postmodern garb, or singular outfits with no designer labels at all, our novels march their many ways, fulfilling the possibilities or landing in the pitfalls of their chosen modes.

Both of these novels, for example, revolve around an American city and family, American lives and life. But from Maureen Howard's Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Marilyn Dorn Staats' Atlanta, Georgia, lies an enormous fictional plain. Staats in her modest first novel invites a traditional suspension of disbelief. Howard in her extravagant sixth does a tango with the very concept of “once upon a time,” which she refers to in Natural History as the “contract between teller and all children, by which I mean us kids, lead-in to magic remodeling of reality.”

In Looking for Atlanta, Staats tells a familiar tale, and she tells it in a familiar mode, even if her narrator is unusually situated on her best friend's roof, accompanied by her yardman, Harold, and armed with a bottle of booze. The date of this rooftop vigil is April 17, 1981. The place is an upward-reaching Atlanta suburb. And the narrator is Margaret Hunter Bridges, a “43-year-old lapsed Southern Belle,” a former debutante (known in the local parlance as a “Buckhead Pink”), who on her rooftop perch is writing her journal: the story of a life that has veered painfully off its expected course, the story which, at its conclusion, will mark what she calls “the end of my past.”

What is it that has brought Margaret to expose herself so shockingly on a rooftop? This is certainly not the behavior prescribed by her mother, whose “favorite credo,” found in her well-worn copy of Mrs. Dull's Guide to Southern Etiquette, reads: “If something unpleasant is happening, pretend not to notice. To do otherwise would embarrass your guests and family.”

At first, the main reason for her transgression appears to be her husband Peter's desertion for a younger woman. I confess I was less than eager to read about yet another fickle male's midlife crisis, however humorously described—and Staats can be very funny, whether describing Margaret's husband or other macho males, her narrow-minded and often mean-spirited friends, or her own comically misdirected efforts. But gradually we come to see that the reason is more complex: it is really the recent death of Margaret's seventeen-year-old daughter Meg that has torn this family apart.

That death was accidental: “‘No crime,’ the police assured me …” Margaret tells us. “‘No crime has been committed here.’” But the effects of grief and guilt have been devastating. In one moving sequence, Staats follows Margaret's train of thought from a love scene in From Here to Eternity to the various things that can interfere with lovemaking when you've been married a long time. Such as cystitis. Or a bad back. Or perhaps grief. “And when you are grieving,” she says,

one of you may not feel the same way at the same time as the other one of you who is grieving. One of you may just want to lie quietly on her back under the father of her first-born child who died and do nothing at all. And the other one of you may want to do everything in a hurry. He may need to get back at his daughter's death by proving to himself, with angry, pain-inflicting thrusts, that he, at least, is still alive.

(p. 101)

The novel's central issue, then, is not an unfaithful husband, nor is its central question whether he will come home. In fact, Staats treats the marital rift as comedy, even farce, which balances the grimmer issue of grief.

Is Margaret really planning to jump off the roof, as her grandmother did? At no point did I believe that. Hers is a voice too filled with energy and life to be seriously contemplating death. That voice with its frank intelligence, its canny humor, its Southern lilt, carries the novel, lifting it above its weaknesses. This is not to say that Margaret is altogether admirable. For all her silent apologies to Harold, the devoted black yardman who is with her—for her inherited privilege, for the fact of her whiteness—Margaret remains a Southern white woman to the end, much as Harold remains in his old age as subservient as he was in his youth. “We're two anachronisms,” Margaret reflects. “Two products of the same dying culture.”

With its old-fashioned storytelling and characters, Looking for Atlanta may itself strike some readers as an anachronism. It is not a book John Barth would call “technically up-to-date.” Maureen Howard's Natural History is a different affair. An ambitious, sprawling novel, it draws on an array of artistic techniques to tell its story of the Brays, an Irish family of Bridgeport; to tell the story of Bridgeport; and to tell a story of America itself. Appropriately, the novel includes some violence, celebrity and glitz: it has a murder, a movie-star protagonist and a location that was the operating base of P. T. Barnum, the master of hype.

Natural History starts straightforwardly enough, introducing us to the Brays and to Bridgeport, Howard's own birthplace (and the setting of her autobiography Facts of Life which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1978). In prose that is sweeping but precise, deftly changing perspectives as she did in her earlier work, Howard focuses on a Saturday in the 1940s. We see Nell Bray, the mother, concentrating on family and home, obsessively concerned for her son; we see her son James, at thirteen already a musician, a magician, a charmer, off to his clarinet lesson; we see his sister Catherine, at eleven already compulsive, determined to win a Girl Scout competition; and we see William Aloysius Bray, a swaggering county detective, investigating the shooting of a soldier by the seductive Isabelle Poole.

In subsequent chapters, Howard turns to other styles as she follows the lives of James and Catherine, “the one child who will always know what he wants and the one who will never get what she wants.” Two large sections seem to dominate the book. The first is the long “Closet Drama,” a performance piece complete with script directions, in which James, now 52, tells us about his life, his movie career, his second marriage to a beautiful rodeo star, his daughter, and his decision to direct his own film in which he will play his father, a detective investigating the soldier's murder in Bridgeport.

The second large section is titled “Double Entry” and is arranged as a double entry, “the beautiful concept … of bookkeeping,” the text explains, in which “the debit and credit must always agree.” On the right-hand side of the page, the author follows the story of James in Bridgeport, where he has come to make his film and where he meets up with Catherine, who knows a terrible secret about the murder. On the left-hand side of the page, Howard gives us a compendium of excerpts, letters, cartoons, facts relating to Bridgeport, to P. T. Barnum and his show, but also fictions relating to her characters. Here, for example, we have the story of Jumbo, the “best-loved pachyderm,” killed by a Canadian freight train in 1885; here we have data on Bridgeport's Arcade and a letter from Barnum to Samuel Clemens.

“If yearning for the outcome,” says Howard.

you may depart this side of the page, read on in the story—the will he? the won't she? whatever will become of? It's your right, the pleasure you take in how they will meet once more—those threads; … Read on, flip back, dip in.

(p. 224)

It may be that in this compendium, Howard not only wants to give us Bridgeport but also, like Walter Benjamin, whose Arcades Project she discusses—“a collection of aphorisms, quotes, contemplations accruing to the industrial culture”—she intends “no less than to alter our relation to the page, to let us shop, that's the whimsy, through … chosen topics and cultural totems …” And it may be that in offering this history-album beside her invented story, she is having fun, creating an entertainment.

I only wish that I had found all of this more entertaining. “Closet Drama” struck me as tedious. “Double Entry” seemed to offer on the one hand a less than compelling story of Catherine, now a spinner and weaver, and of James, now making love to Catherine's friend, an ex-nun turned social worker; and on the other hand, an elaborate gimmick. Nor was I especially eager to finish the story, even with Catherine's secret yet to be revealed—the only bit in the novel which, though introduced late, offers some needed momentum.

Maureen Howard is a wonderful writer, and I have enjoyed her earlier works immensely. But this one strikes me as something of a stew. Though she juxtaposes strands of natural, social and personal history, patterns of American hopes and familial ties, she fails to weave these threads together into an enlightening or moving whole. Let me say straight out that I may be in the minority in this opinion. But try as I did to appreciate this work by a very fine writer, I couldn't feel its force.