Hmm, This Sounds Familiar . . .

A FAMILY DAUGHTER

By Maile Meloy

Scribner. 325 pp. $24

In her first novel, "Liars and Saints," Maile Meloy stripped her language to the bone -- but that is not to say that she established herself as a minimalist. In both "Liars and Saints" and this new novel, "A Family Daughter," she goes after the big picture and uses her broad and simple strokes to depict as many lives as she can crowd into her line of vision. Both novels tell the interlocking stories of four generations of the Santerre family, Californians of French Canadian descent. In short, intense chapters, Meloy takes the perspective of one character, then another. She plows through decades as if time's a-wasting, and her plots are full of shockers that she somehow manages to convince a reader are not all that shocking. In "Liars and Saints," the action includes incest, murder and the matriarch's claim that she is the mother of her grandchild.

But if "Liars and Saints" is the work of a stark realist, "A Family Daughter" is something else again. Comparisons of first and second novels are especially odious, but there's no way around it here, since this second novel is a retelling of the first. And what a retelling it is. In the first novel, Jamie Santerre had an affair with his niece (who turned out to be his cousin). In this new version, Abby once again has an affair with her uncle, only this time he really is her uncle, and Abby is a novelist writing "Liars and Saints" -- yes, the first novel -- out of guilt and compulsion. (Her exploration of Catholicism's cultural impact on succeeding generations is more developed in this second telling of the Santerres' story.) Many of the details about her family are the same, and many are changed: Abby's aunt is no longer childless, her grandmother is not murdered, and she herself does not die of cancer after giving birth to Jamie's child.

The new book, then, is what most of us would call postmodern: It acknowledges the artifice of its own construction and asks a reader to decide what's so realistic about realism in the first place. (Abby also points out that novelists were up to these tricks long before we came up with the term "postmodern.") The second version of Abby's story also teases readers about our voracious need to identify autobiography in fiction -- at least, it seems teasing at first. Later, as Abby's affair with her uncle begins to cause her real psychological harm, it becomes downright melancholy. A reader can't help but wonder how close the connection is between Abby Santerre the writer and Maile Meloy the writer.

The novel strikes a number of different tones on its way to deciding what voice it will project. Its opening has a good deal of fun upending the first novel, and the reader has some fun, too, with the challenge.

One of the perhaps inevitable results of a more conceptual approach, though, is that we don't feel nearly as involved with the characters this time around. In "Liars and Saints," Meloy climbed right into Jamie's skin, and his actions, however impulsive and rash, seemed not only forgivable but almost inevitable. It's easier to dismiss the Jamie of "A Family Daughter," or to laugh at him. When he takes up with a beautiful rich blonde named (no kidding) Saffron, the novel seems intent on satire; but when Saffron heads to Argentina to stay with her fabulously self-centered mother, Josephine, it's not clear whether we're in the realm of farce, soap opera or pure absurdity.

Josephine has adopted a child born to a Hungarian prostitute but passes him off as a Romanian orphan, and the ensuing global complications are both glitzy and bizarre. But in Abby's guilty, confessional sessions with an eminently sensible psychologist, the tone is so far from comedic that a reader can't be blamed for feeling disoriented.

The second half of the novel finally settles into a voice much more reminiscent of "Liars and Saints," and literary allusions fade away in favor of that old standby, realism.

Though the tone of "A Family Daughter" wobbles at first, it's nonetheless delightful to observe an intelligent writer move beyond the formal limitations she set for herself the first time around. (And it must be mentioned that she also has removed the limitations to her sex scenes, which here are far more erotic and extended.) It's hard to say what effect the second novel will have on a reader who hasn't read the first, but Meloy's writing is certainly fast-moving and compelling, sometimes in the manner of a smart contemporary observer and sometimes in the manner of a smart gossip columnist.

Meloy is stretching, intellectually and artistically, and watching her take risks is often a pleasure. "A Family Daughter" is not always consistent and not always convincing, but it is ambitious and playful and clever. That's a fair enough literary bargain for any novel, retold or not.