Imagining Men

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE FIREMAN'S FAIR

by Josephine Humphreys

Viking; 263 pages; $19.95

There is nothing like a 140-m.p.h. wind to get a new slant on things. That, at least, is the premise of Josephine Humphreys' third novel, set in Charleston, S.C., and environs shortly after Hurricane Hugo whipped through in late September 1989.

What more seductive place to locate a story about love and other disasters? The city has its irresistible charms: 18th century architecture, a dashing 19th century history and old families that have been likened to the ancient Chinese because they eat rice, drink tea and worship their ancestors. Minutes away are the Sea Islands, where the area's oversupply of physicians and lawyers spend languorous weekends gunking around in their Boston Whalers, sipping beer and picking crab.

Humphreys laid claim to this distinctive territory in Dreams of Sleep and Rich in Love. The Fireman's Fair should establish clear title. Her seemingly effortless sense of character and place comes from a life-long association with the Low Country and its ways. Like summer heat lightning, her style is subdued and swiftly illuminating. She is also a witty observer of regional manners. A black character, chary about New South liberalism, is described as multilingual since "he could speak the language that his listener wanted to hear."

Not so the principal character of the new novel. Rob Wyatt, a 32-year-old lawyer, is not even sure that he wants to hear his own monologues. He sees himself as a philosophical bigamist wedded to two perspectives: "Robert the Serious, a believer; also Rob the Ironic, jokester and cynic." The storm rearranges the rhetoric, leaving Rob the Observer, who drops out of his law firm to live at the beach with his dog Speedo.

A case of posthurricane depression? A literal-minded reader could argue that. But Humphreys puts the ill wind to figurative and far better uses. A white piano partially sunk in the marsh, a detached spiral staircase coiled against the horizon suggest fresh ways of seeing.

Wyatt has a writer's sensibility, but Humphreys was wise to make him a lawyer. The profession symbolizes convention, respectability and decorum. Were her protagonist a writer, expectedly musing at the beach, no one would bother with him. There would be no lovely Louise, former girlfriend and wife of his ex-partner, trying to mother him back to responsibility and solvency. There would be no Billie, the child-woman who, like the dog trainer in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, teaches new tricks.

Humphreys is a virtuoso of intimation. Her insights and ironies cause twinges rather than shocks of recognition. It is no coincidence that while Wyatt prefers imagining women to handling them, his father is a philanderer who tells his son, "I'm a man who made a dozen women happy for a short time and one woman unhappy for 45 years." Imagining men, Humphreys artfully brings good news and bad: men are educable, but women still have to do it.