FICTION

FAMILY by J. California Cooper (Doubleday: $18.95; 233 pp.) . Here is a clever construction of a narrative voice that is both first-person and omniscient: By Page 35, the storyteller is dead, but she can still observe what’s going on although she has no control over events. The narrator is the dead mother of four young slaves in the American South before and during the Civil War. She tracks their adventures as one is sold, another runs away and a third ends up not only free but wealthy. Many novels have been written about slavery, but this one is original, stirring, vividly personal and painfully intense. The author, in an understated way, deals with gut-level emotions that spring from belonging to somebody who can rape you, beat you and sell your child. When a slave finds her little sister dead, she doesn’t dare to cry: “The scream started and stopped in the same instant.” But family ties survived in children who were sold away from their mothers, in couples wrenched apart at the auction block, and between brothers and sisters who managed to run away to better lives.