Beasty Boys

THE EVENING WOLVES by Joan Chase

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

295 pages; $18.95

In his introduction to a 1965 reissue of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, the poet and critic Randall Jarrell defined a novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." Stead's celebrated book was indeed lengthy and imperfect. But it had at its center an unforgettable father figure whose weakness and tyrannical urges were disguised by forced jollity. Francis Clemmons, the dear old dad of Joan Chase's lyric second novel (her first, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, won PEN's Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award in 1984), also has an unnerving gift of gab. " 'We're walking farther into this rotting grave and shall we ne'er get out?' " is the sort of banter his children would hear while riding piggyback.

Clemmons' cemetery humor keeps grief and the black dog at bay. His wife Phoebe died in a traffic accident and left him with three children to raise. Margy is a full-figured twelve-year-old with well-developed defenses against rutting boys. Younger Ruthann has a scholarly bent but is a bit too pliable when it comes to romantic advances and the overtures of Fundamentalist religion. There is a baby brother and, eventually, a stepmother.

By contemporary standards the Clemmonses are a messed-up conventional family. But how parents and siblings interact during the children's crucial teen years is conveyed in ways that may be unfamiliar. Chase subordinates plot to an arrangement of domestic crises and adolescent rituals. The passage of time is more impressionistic than chronological. Points of view are fluid and exclusively female. The wolves of the title are the male characters, whose sex drives are less complicated than those of the Clemmons girls or their stepmother. Men seem interested in only one thing, or at least in one thing at a time, while Chase's women demonstrate a more integrated notion of events and emotions.

Whatever the biological or social truth of Wolves, the novel's artistic conviction cannot be separated from its language, a private brew of nuance, unexpected humor and explosive strength that can already be quickly and appreciatively distinguished as the Chase style.