Eccentric Neighborhoods.

Eccentric Neighborhoods By Rosario Ferre Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 340 pages. $24.00.

Rosario Ferre, the Puerto Rican author whose previous works of fiction include The Youngest Doll, Sweet Diamond Dust, and The House on the Lagoon, is one of a handful of contemporary Latin American women writers who can claim an international readership. In Ferre's new novel, Eccentric Neighborhoods, the fictional Elvira Vernet records her family history from the turn of the century to the present, a history that reflects the coinciding political and economic changes of Puerto Rico itself.

Although the novel's breadth is ambitious and full of strikingly detailed (and often comic) moments, the work as a whole is sprawling and struggles to sustain itself. By the end, its highly anecdotal nature results in a whole that is far less than the sum of its parts.

The two sides of Elvira's family mirror Puerto Rico's shift from a primarily agricultural society to an industrial one. Her mother's original home, her "lost paradise," is the insular and finally obsolete world of the sugar plantation owners. Elvira's father is a wealthy businessman and politician whose family's construction and cement companies are responsible for building Puerto Rico's cities.

The novel's emotional core, however, lies in the relationship between Elvira and her mother, who is bitter for having sacrificed so much that she can scarcely link the person she has become ("Aurelio's comforter, his adviser, the university-educated mother of his children") to the person she was ("Clarissa Rivas de Santillana, who had once planted Guayames's sugarcane valleys and taken responsibility for the family business"). Determined to resist repeating her mother's compromises, Elvira says to her: "When I grow up I'm going to have my own career. I'll be a doctor, a businesswoman, a reporter, maybe even an agronomist. Anything but a housewife!"

"Is that right?" her mother responds. "We'll see about that, Miss Liberty."

When Elvira gets married, her mother gives her myrtle bushes she had brought from her home when she married. "Myrtle summons the spirits; when it blooms, ghosts like to gather around it." This gift of ghosts ostensibly gives rise to the huge cast of characters who populate the novel, extending the narrative far beyond the mother-daughter conflict. Indeed, the book's opening dedication reads: "To the ghosts who lent me their voices."

But this claim that the book is ghost-inspired is undermined by its rigid form; the novel is less haunted than it is self-consciously structured. Although many of the chapters are compelling in and of themselves, rarely does one feed into another. The reader's experience is thus more like flipping through an album or walking into a room of family portraits; the subjects, though related, are bound by separate frames. Had the author been as faithful to her own imagination as she was committed to recording a comprehensive history, the dead would have stepped out of their frames.

The novel ends with a dream Elvira has years after her mother's death: As mother and daughter cross the rising Rio Loco on their way to Emajaguas, Clarissa's original home, their car stalls, and instead of the dogs and goats and pigs that were typically swept away as the water raged by, Elvira's aunts and grandmothers are "all swimming desperately against the current." Elvira and her mother are saved from drowning. "And as we drove away I could hear... the voices of those I could no longer see, but whose stories I could not have dreamed."

The vast and rich material of these stories is not so much unmanageable as overmanaged, resulting in a work that is both overextended and too tightly restrained. What lies between the covers: more than one potential novel, and not yet one.

Lisa Chipongian is a fiction writer living in Madison, Wisconsin.