by Jessamyn West
"My mother, Myra Chase, named me Orpha after Orpheus, the legendary Greek poet. She valued writing." This novel, which reads like the autobiography of a novelist, starts out in Kentucky just after the turn of the century. Orpha Chase witnesses some backwoods melodrama during her childhood, marries a teacher and becomes one herself, sees her young husband kill another man and then himself and finally migrates to California to keep house for her brother, a famous Quaker evangelist. Orpha, a curiously passive heroine, writes an extravagant novel about her brother that is made into a movie. West grew up in California, and her first novel, The Friendly Persuasion, was about a Quaker. (That book became a famous movie.) Regardless of how autobiographical this novel is, it reads like a richly detailed, romantic novel—in the best sense of the word romantic. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $11.95)
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