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Letter From Point Clear
By Dennis McFarland
Holt, 290 pp., $25

In five previous novels, Dennis McFarland has brought his compassionate sense of the world to the precisely rendered interiors of domestic realism. His characters are full-bodied in part because of the losses they've endured: a brother's suicide, a young father's murder on a Boston street. An authorial mood of graceful endurance accompanies such tragedies, as though the question is not whether bad news will happen, but how best to grab ahold of the ground when the fall presents itself. God is not mocked in McFarland's fiction, but neither is he wholly absent -- somewhere in each cave of longing is always a door.

"Letter From Point Clear" unfolds in the year after the death of a wealthy Southern patriarch; his three adult children have long since left the Alabama coastal town where they grew up for lives and families in the East. Their mother died giving birth to the youngest, Bonnie, and all three offspring have subsequently formed intricate relationships with one another to fill that gap -- and to buffer themselves against the rough sorrows of life with an alcoholic father. Ellen, a Cambridge poet in her mid-40s and the eldest of the Owen children, seems to have taken their father's death the hardest; she's asked her kindly husband, Dan, for a brief separation and retreated to Wellfleet while their son is at camp. Morris, a few years younger, is the emotional fulcrum of the novel. A gay literature professor who's recently married his partner of 14 years, he adores Ellen's boy, Willie; he's sharp and honest enough to tell each sister what he thinks, sometimes ahead of good sense. All of the Owens are financially independent -- their money goes back far enough generationally that its source is never mentioned -- and Morris doesn't need to work; that he does is evidence of the dutiful, sometimes passionate man behind the irreverent (sometimes caustic) facade. Bonnie is the wild child who elected to stay in Point Clear upon their father's death. A decade of acting in New York failed to bring her the success she sought, though she brought her talent for high drama back home to Alabama; lately, she's been redecorating the old manse, armed with a prescription for Ativan and a half-read copy of "The Power and the Glory." Ellen and Morris attend to their younger sister with either a furrowed brow or a raised eyebrow -- she's too hysterical for them to take seriously, and too dear for them not to. When a letter for Ellen arrives announcing Bonnie's hip-shot marriage to an evangelical preacher, the Owen elders board a plane for Alabama -- over-involvement being one of the obvious legacies of an unhappy family.

That's the ballast of "Letter From Point Clear," the majority of which takes place on the Alabama coast, where Bonnie has found a younger, charismatic man whose parents named him Pastor even before the holy spirit claimed him. With his unequivocal warmth and equally fierce certainty of God's plan, Pastor represents the antithesis of Bonnie's prior life, though she's conscious of having traded one dependency for another: "What she liked most about the God-as-a-drug idea was that you couldn't run out of it." Fund-raising for a mall-like complex for his Church of the Blessed Hunger, Pastor calls his new wife "Bonnie girl" and is thrilled to welcome her siblings, lost to the East, back into the flock -- never mind that he's the one living in their childhood home. The crucial detail that Bonnie has neglected to tell Pastor, it soon becomes clear, is that her adored older brother is married to a man.

So the placement at the dinner table goes something like this: born-again preacher, Pastor's tacky-but-well-intentioned parents, high-strung (and newly pregnant) Bonnie, world-weary, still-grieving Ellen, and lightning-rod Morris (who corrects his sisters' grammar and makes gay-lifestyle jokes at Pastor's expense). At first glance, the conflict between Morris's sexual preference and Pastor's religious zealotry may not seem enough on which to hang a novel, but McFarland uses it to create a greater tableau about class, religion, and family ties and chains. His authorial point of view moves seamlessly among his central characters, so that Ellen's vaguely eerie unhappiness, for instance, is as real as Bonnie's tremulous excursion into her new life. One of the most well-drawn characters of the novel is Macy, the cook and caretaker who has lived at Point Clear for decades, tending to the Owens' father through his solitary years, now trying to juggle the emotional and culinary needs of the recent arrivals. With her lemon meringue pie and cafeteria-style Catholicism, she exhibits more common sense than the lot of them together.

If "Letter From Point Clear" has a story-line weakness, it's that the actual collision of forces presented in this tableau -- Pastor's moral proselytizing and Morris's wry stance of holding firm -- seems a bit too civil. Even when Pastor calls a prayer group to join hands over his new brother-in-law's homosexuality, Morris and Ellen manage to stay put, roll their eyes, and at least fake the pleasantries of domestic harmony. No doors slammed, no voices raised, no midnight exits to the airport. Given the flagrant opposition between these two camps, it's hard to believe -- even among Southerners -- that the conversation would stay this genteel.

But the novel goes back on course with McFarland's assumption of Pastor's point of view -- a task he accomplishes beautifully, from the young preacher's emotional insecurities to his wild misfire of aggression at the beach one day. The emotional leaps (and leaps of faith) here are subtle but crucial: Morris, whose arsenal of protective irony is also his failing, finds a mercy he didn't know he possessed when he goes up against his nemesis. Such victories are slow-gained and even slower to reveal themselves: "[Morris] knew that in the near and distant future, he would review this scene and feel heartbroken at not having been somehow more effective in it, and at not being able, from that future vantage, to revise it." Such revisions belong to novelists, of course, who possess the omniscience that real life sorely lacks. With its finely evoked tableaus from Wellfleet to the Alabama coast, "Letter From Point Clear" is a gratifying, emotionally resonant novel -- its heart and longing steeped in the Old South, its sensibility years and miles beyond.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.