Her Mother's Secrets

A Southern gothic of race, class and sex centers on a mother's lost childhood

THE ARMS OF GOD

A Novel

By Lynne Hinton

St. Martin's. 254 pp. $24.95

Five years ago a pastor named Lynne Hinton started serving up her Hope Springs series with Friendship Cake , a novel about the North Carolina Hope Springs Community Church cookbook committee. Although not reviewed in The Important Places, it preached to a large choir of female readers and sat primly on the bestseller list for several months. Hinton followed that success with Hope Springs and Forever Friends , and, as you might guess from the titles, these aren't anything like the novels in that other series by a Christian minister, Tim LaHaye, whose apocalyptic "Left Behind" books imagine most of us swallowed up in hellfire. Friendship Cake is full of Christian faith, but that burning smell isn't brimstone; it's Jessie's pecan pie. Which is not to say that the novels are all sweetness and light, although they do contain both (along with recipes and gardening advice). But they're earnest, kind and heartfelt, and anybody who has anything mean to say about them should just go sit in the back of the church until his attitude improves, thank you very much.

Hinton's new novel, The Arms of God , is actually the first one she ever wrote, and it's darker and more portentous than her vast audience has come to expect from her. Although Hinton says she revised it extensively over the past 17 years, The Arms of God still reaches for more than it can grasp, and that's a shame because it's a memorable story, full of the huge American themes of race, class and sex.

At the start, we meet Alice, whose long-lost mother, Olivia, has just died after contacting her only three weeks earlier. During their brief, awkward reunion, Alice learned nothing about her mother's secret life, but after her death, Alice tracks down her apartment and finds a scrapbook that holds scattered clues. At that point, the novel moves back in time to its central plot: Olivia's childhood in Greensboro, N.C., as the daughter of a loose, self-destructive woman named Mattie who lived on the edge of town.

Olivia and her deeply troubled brother are best friends with the black children who live next door under the care of their saintly mother, Mrs. Love, in "a place of pure sweetness." (Subtlety is not one of this novel's problems. Mrs. Love's daughter is named Tree -- think lynching, crucifixion -- because her "eyes were as steady as wood and her skin was as smooth as hickory bark.") For a while the racial tension in town doesn't touch these children, but we see the deadly effects elsewhere, and the final moments explode with a horrific act of violence that explains Olivia's shattered reappearance on her daughter's doorstep many decades later.

The structural problems here are considerable: The story moves in fits and starts, and only a few of the characters seem animated at a time, as though a single puppeteer were trying to work the whole show. Hinton is best when spinning legends: Her tale about the murder of a black teen and a white preacher's pyrrhic act of repentance is searing -- the kind of haunting anecdote one never forgets. But too often her hydrogenated Southern gothic language reads like Toni Morrison on a Twinkie high: "If [Olivia's mother] died the youngest child would be left with nothing of family except for the son of a jungle orphan who wrapped anger and mistrust so tightly within himself that it bled through the skin of his neck. So Mattie, who was not even aware of the power of motherhood, completely without a picture to recognize or compare it to and who was desperate to die, clung to the tiny bits of life that slid down her throat tasting like ripe strawberries and began to measure her dreamy, nightmarish state of living spoonful by spoonful."

Less of this would be more. Too much of the emotional pain here is conveyed in language that overwhelms it or renders it trite. If one more character shed a "lone tear," I was going to buy these people a bottle of Visine. And as a minister, Hinton should know better than to toss around the word "evil" as though it were table salt. The novel's climactic climax -- there's no other way to describe this overwrought crescendo -- thunders toward us like the Four Horsemen, though Hinton says over and over again that "no one present put the puzzle pieces of prophecy together." Since this is a puzzle with just three enormous pieces, that's a remarkable failing on the town's part. We hear about "the coming of evil" so many times that when it finally lumbers in, it's more of a relief than a surprise. I'm all for preaching loud enough to reach the sleepy members in the back pew, but sometimes a whisper grabs more attention than a shriek.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.