UNDER THE DOG STAR

The downward slide evident in Caldwell's second novel, The Deer at the River (1984), continues with this fumbling, lackluster study of a family's attempt to regroup after a melodramatic death. The problems start with the cockamamie premise: needing the cash to acquire 20 acres of pasture, formerly part of his wife's farm in upstate New York, newspaper-man Andy Durant holds up gas stations; he is killed the fifth time out. His widow Grady, unaware of Andy's motivation, moves her three kids and self back to the farm, though sharing Andy's knowledge that farm foreclosures are epidemic: ""she could be as stupid and daring as he."" Exactly: this story originates with 20 acres and two mules. Grady's plan to retrieve those acres from neighbor Ned Ryerson blossoms into a determination to go for ""the whole works"" (the pasture plus Ned) when she discovers his wife Claire is dying of cancer. But Grady is not always the manipulative schemer; her way of coping with Andy's death is to surrender to sexual impulse, whether it's a roll in the hay with Ned or a roadside quickie with Guy Duskin, a lumber-mill worker she met minutes before. And it's not just Mom; her teenage kids Peter and Anne both experiment sexually with Royal, Guy's unacknowledged son who works on the farm. ""We've been hysterical"" Grady tells him. ""What we think is love is really a kind of panic."" She draws the line at Royal, who promptly drowns himself. At his funeral, Grady (having been jilted by Ned) agrees to let Guy live with her, thus confronting her inner chaos. Problem is, the chaos spills out into the plot; there is no unifying sensibility at work here, to take these scraps of Southern gothic, scraps of D.H. Lawrence, scraps of Thomas Berger, and meld them into some kind of whole.