Density of the Past

KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE by Shirley Ann Grau. 309 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Because the label "feminine" has come to be attached to the stylistic spinsterism and tiny ironies of both sexes, there is a temptation to miscall the writing of Shirley Ann Grau masculine. It is not, although the author has no trouble bringing to stage center a male in whom there is no sense of Bernhardt corseted as Hamlet.

In this third novel the author's calm view is womanly enough, but it is of a world in which men do command the center of the stage. The world is Southern: planting, shooting, politics. The narrator is Abigail Mason, a divorced heiress, who tells of her grandfather and her husband, two hard men who did not like each other. The grandfather, William Rowland, lives as he pleases on vast timberlands owned by his ancestors since the War of 1812. He pleases, as it turns out, to take a Negro mistress after his wife's death and fathers several children by her.

In a Frank Yerby romance, such a situation would be accompanied by offstage thunder and lightning. In Novelist Grau's story it makes quiet sense. So does the plot development--melodramatic only in synopsis. Abigail's husband goes into segregationist politics. Grandfather's open secret does not bother the voters--until an opponent discovers that he had not just taken his Negro girl for a mistress; he had married her. As outraged as any of his supporters at this breach in the code, Abigail's husband does what he has to do: he leaves her, abandons his campaign, and leads a mob to burn Grandfather Howland's barn to the ground.

The reader is left with a flooding sense of the density of the past. This, and the knowledge of a vast land's dark extent, are what Shirley Ann Grau sets down uncommonly well.

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