Flowering Mimosa

Closely observed, efficiently rather than brilliantly written, this novel of three generations settles on a teenage girl as principal character. Beginning in rural Texas, moving to a mining town in Idaho, with an excursion into Mexico, it traces the ill fortune of the Wingfield family, driven from their land by the iron laws of economics. Tamsen, the girl, loathes her adulterous stepmother and, finding her life intolerable, tests her mettle by running off to Mexico with a local boy, whom she soon comes to detest. Steadily, implacably, she learns something about human nature and the ways of the cold world. Nothing triumphal happens and no great claims are madethis is essentially a 1930s setting revisited a half-century laterbut we are convinced that the lives of such people have been plausibly and feelingly depicted. (January 15)