ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS

FerrÇ's second novel in English, and first since her NBA- nominated The House by the Lagoon (1995), creates a colorful family saga as a way to explore the modern political and social history of her native Puerto Rico. The narrator, Elvira Vernet, claims descent from two prominent families whose divergent natures effectively embody contrary strains in the national character. Elvira's mother, Clarissa Rivas de Santillana, grew up among a privileged family made wealthy by its several sugar plantations and given to a dreamlike, contemplative ``faith in inspiration, the importance of aesthetic experience, and love of nature.'' FerrÇ skillfully traces the consequences of the Santillanas' passivity throughout three generations, focusing on the educational and marital experiences of Clarissa and her four sisters (``the five Ledas of Mount Olympus''), all named after their studious mother's favorite literary heroines. The best of their several stories include the continuing romantic misadventures of ``Tia LakhmÇ'' and the betrayal of the devotion to poetry of ``Tia Dido'' (when her literary hero Juan Ramon Jimenez comes to lunch, and the scales fall from Dido's eyes forever). As the five daughters attend the university and their circle of acquaintances widens, the family is gradually drawn toward modern industrialism, leftist politics, the US, and the seeds of their ruin. By contrast, the family of Elvira's father, the Vernets, are dominated by patriarch Santiago (``Chaquito'') and his four sons: bluff, extroverted careerists whose commercial ice-plant and cement factory prosper, placing them in the forefront of Puerto Rico's struggles for independence, though nothing can save them from a destiny of violent conflict, infidelity, and suicide. Moving like a firestorm, the novel throws off subsidiary characters and subplots with too-often confusing and occasionally reckless abandon. It's difficult to absorb all the particulars of FerrÇ's crowded narrative, and to distinguish among her many characters and their convoluted relationships. Still, one admires FerrÇ's ferocious ingenuity and energy as she depicts a society and century in flux. This most demanding of her novels so far is probably also the best.