Truth Potion

By EMILY MITCHELL

SLOW POISON

by Sheila Bosworth

Knopf; 322 pages; $21

Do Southern writers have longer memories than other people, or does it only seem that way? In her second novel, Sheila Bosworth, a New Orleans native, evokes her home state and its people with elegiac grace and gusts of humor. The combination goes down as smoothly as bourbon mixed with bitters and sugar, a drink that has "the transcendent blend of passion and troubles and sweet pity."

On a flight from Manhattan to Louisiana, Rory Cade recounts a family history that echoes the turbulent events of the '60s. The slow poison of the title is ( booze; it is also the ecstasy of love. Both are the straight stuff that delivers Rory's father to hell. After the mother of his three young daughters dies, he marries Aimee Desiree, a wild Creole beauty half his age. The marriage -- and the faithless Aimee Desiree -- is doomed. She meets her fate at 3 a.m. in a white Thunderbird hurtling along a narrow causeway across Lake Pontchartrain. The daughters never hear their father mention her again, but the moment of her passing envelopes each of them. The author understands a fundamental truth about Southerners: to them, she writes, "sweet and sad mean the same thing." Like an expert mixologist, Bosworth measures out life's sorrow in equal proportion to its sweetness.