Millennium Fevers

Gail Godwin's 10th novel, Evensong (Ballantine; 405 pages; $25), is set in the very near future indeed, specifically the waning weeks of 1999. Millennial fever has reached even the idyllic and remote Smoky Mountain town of High Balsam, N.C. (winter pop. 1,000), where Margaret Bonner, 33, serves as rector of All Saints Episcopal Church. "Winter in the Great Smokies would shortly be upon us," Margaret says at the outset of her tale, "the winter that would see us into the next century and the new millennium. Other things were on their way to us as well, things we neither anticipated nor, in some cases, could even imagine. This is the story of how we met them and were changed by them."

As good as her tantalizing opening words, Margaret goes on to recount an extremely hectic four or so weeks in her life. For openers, her six-year marriage to Adrian, 20 years her senior and the chaplain at a nearby experimental school for troubled youths, seems to be foundering. He is depressed, overburdened with work--filling in for the headmaster-founder who has recently died--and physically inattentive. Then there is Tony, an old man in a monk's habit who appears at the rectory requesting lodging. Next comes Chase, a teenager at Adrian's school who was expelled and has nowhere else to go.

Finally, a former High Balsam resident named Grace Munger has reappeared in town, hectoring everyone to join the "Millennium Birthday March for Jesus" that she is organizing, spurred on, she claims, by divine inspiration. Much of her bullying is directed at Margaret, who refuses to commit herself or her church to this sort of public demonstration. "We need less display," Margaret lectures Grace, "and more unassuming deeds behind the scenes." Privately, though, Margaret worries, "Am I just being a snob?"

If this were not a Gail Godwin novel, the reader's answer might be a rapid affirmative. For Margaret does display some narrative traits that seem to demand an ironic double take. She has the habit, for example, of quoting everyone else's fulsome praise of her: "Oh, Margaret, what a great, great story... You say such wise things, Margaret... You're an extraordinary young woman, Margaret." Isn't Margaret a wee bit full of herself? And what to make of this rector's loving inventories of the riches of her church, "the Elsa Van Wyck Memorial Ciborium with Van's grandmother's diamonds and garnets encrusted in the base, and the Georgian silver thurible...?"

But Godwin shows no interest in undercutting or exposing her heroine-narrator. The author has accomplished something more difficult than ridicule; she has created a character who has enough flaws to satisfy contemporary skeptics but who also struggles convincingly with the old-fashioned task of being a good person. For all its leisurely pace, Evensong turns out, near the end, to have wasted few words. It concludes with an Epilogue, set further in the future than its opening chapter, that not only ties up loose ends but also dares to be, in these uncertain times, optimistic.