THE END OF CALIFORNIA By Steve Yarbrough

I once had an English professor who argued that Mississippi had produced more great literature than the other 49 states put together. That seemed excessive -- the man clearly had a thing about William Faulkner -- but it is true that in the middle of the past century Southern literature was ascendant. It boasted not only Faulkner but also Welty, O'Connor, Percy, Warren, Agee, Styron, Capote -- make your own list, for there are many to choose from. In time the critical focus moved elsewhere: to urban, often Jewish writers such as Bellow, Roth, Mailer and Malamud; to African Americans such as Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison; and to others. But while literary fashions come and go, down in Dixie good writers keep producing fine novels. Today's example is "The End of California" by Steve Yarbrough, a native of Indianola, Miss., who now teaches in California and whose 2004 offering, "Prisoners of War," was a PEN/Faulkner finalist.

In the new novel, a 42-year-old doctor named Pete Barrington returns from California to his little home town in Mississippi. He started there as a poor farm boy, but brains, looks and football talent helped him advance to college, medical school and a good life out West. An adulterous affair with a patient ended that, and now he, his wife and their 15-year-old daughter are starting over back home. Yarbrough's story blends elements we have seen in other novels -- the small-town South, the football hero grown up, passions that reach back to high school, a little incest and a lot of extramarital sex, racial tensions, hypocrisy among the pious -- but it all works because Yarbrough knows his characters so well, cares for them so deeply and writes of them in prose that is graceful, precise and packed with surprises.

He has a knack for interesting and unexpected exchanges between men and women. At the outset, Barrington is stopped for speeding by a state trooper. She questions him, and they find they know people in common. She hesitates, then lets him go with a warning, whereupon he tells her she should have the spot on her face looked at. By then something has happened, a connection, and she will return.

We next meet Alan, manager of the local Piggly Wiggly, who tells a customer how lucky she is to have her grandchildren coming to visit. Her bitter reply shocks him: "When I was twenty-one and pulling off my clothes in the Pontchartrain down in New Orleans . . . I couldn't see ahead to the day when I'd be sixty and by myself and the easiest solution to somebody else's problem." In another scene, a seduction grows out of a discussion of why a fellow keeps nervously peeling the label off his beer bottle.

Barrington's wife and daughter, spoiled by San Francisco, experience near-fatal culture shock in small-town Mississippi. The wife seeks consolation with Barrington's best friend, a hard-drinking lawyer. The daughter, called "California" by new classmates who find her highly exotic, is drawn to the bright, decent son of the Piggly Wiggly manager. Barrington becomes a volunteer coach of the high school football team, and we learn a lot about the team's fortunes. His daughter, no football fan, watches a pep rally with mounting horror: "The last moron to approach the microphone broke down and cried and swore to win for the sake of his grandfather who'd died six years ago last week. She'd never seen anything like it." The deeply religious grocery store manager hates Barrington because of an incident in high school, and his son's love for the doctor's daughter maddens him.

All these smoldering passions in time lead to murder, but we keep reading less to see if the killer is caught than to see if these all-too-flawed, all-too-believable people can ever make sense of their lives. They share with us such thoughts as: "marriage was the most brutal institution of all. It demanded too much, gave too little back, both demystified and commodified longing. For him, the only mystery left in marriage was how anybody survived it."

I found myself comparing this novel with the North Carolinian David Payne's "Back to Wando Passo," which was reviewed here two weeks ago. Payne's wildly readable, often over-the-top novel offered two stories, one about a burned-out, Southern-born rock star in the present, the other about his wife's ancestor during the Civil War. Yarbrough's "The End of California" is more impressive, ironically, because it is less spectacular, because it limits itself to life more or less as we know it -- which of course is no limitation at all. If I could change anything in this novel, I would cut a scene in which Barrington explains that he is rereading "The Last Picture Show" because "it was the last word on life in a small town. The last word on life in any town." The tribute is not necessary. Readers who admire Larry McMurtry's 1966 classic will already have made the connection.