The Homestead.

AMERICAN fiction has been one long argument with the peculiarly American dream of self-invention. As citizens of a nation rested from wilderness, we've always wanted to believe in our ability to remake ourselves and the environment. Yet almost from the beginning our novels have questioned this presumption. From Ahab to Gatsby to Raymond Carver's sad anomic voices we've gone from raging self-assertion to plaintive sigh, first searching for, than despairing of the dream of perpetual renewal.

Chilton Williamson Jr., former literary editor of this magazine, has powerfully revived the argument, first in Desert Light, and now in The Homestead. He has created characters too large for despair and too angry with America's current demoralization not to be tempted by the dream of self-sufficiency. In his fictional outback town, Fontennelle, Wyoming, he has placed these figures at the intersection of America's horsetrail past and macadamed present, an ideal setting for such men to work out their destinies. most distinctive. He does not meet the usual standards of American likability; is not what you'd call a go-along guy. He is angry. Stoked, in fact, with a fury that's positively sulphurous. The Homestead's Sam Houston Walker is consumed by it.

When we first meet Sam, he has been living in Zambia for ten years, a refugee from his neurotically tormented family who have lived just outside Fontennelle for several generations. He had left to find the honesty and immediacy of a real wilderness. He became a big-game hunter. He reads Hemingway, and has tried to recreate himself as a Hemingway character. In The Green Hills of Africa Hemingway recommended living without "history or mystery," and this is what Sam believes he has accomplished. Embracing a desperate existentialism, he has attempted to exorcise a troubled past by living in a radically foreshortened present. "This worship of the past," he reflects at one point, "accomplishes nothing but the castration of the present moment, which consists of pure Action and is therefore the only reality we know or have." Life without the emotional baggage of family ties, traditional values, romantic attachments-it's simple, clean, direct. Put to the test, however, Sam's philosophy proves utterly false.

When his sister telegraphs him that his younger brother, Jack, may be tried for murder, Sam's first response is macho indifference. Would wiring flowers suffice, he wonders. But this is a pose. He's forced to recognize that although he is ten years and nine thousand miles away from his family, he has never really escaped them.

Once home, he learns the details of his brother's legal problems. Jack has beaten a man nearly to death in what he claims was self-defense against a trespasser. Bad as this is, there are further complications. The man was an employee of Ameroil, the giant oil concern whose development plans the Walker family has opposed, steadfastly refusing to sell it right-of-way for a pipeline.

Sam finds himself in the middle of just the kind of political intrigue he has spent the last ten years avoiding. The town's officials and businessmen, the Chamber of Commerce and Kiwanis Club crowd support Ameroil's growing presence in the region. Ignoring the impact the oil company's operations will have on the environment, they focus on economic opportunities the influx of workers will provide. They're even planning to celebrate by building a new town hall. An architectural rendering shows this to be "a self-consciously modernistic horror of Bauhaus descent," prompting one character to wonder why it is that so many small-town officials boast of the wholesomeness" of their way of life "while working beaverishly to urbanize it." Needless to say, Sam's brother has no fans among these fast-buck entrepreneurs.

At first, Sam feels nothing but contempt for both the town's officials and his brother. Not without cause, he considers Jack a trouble-making drunk. But, slowly, as he finds out more, he's forced to change his mind. In so doing, he takes a closer and unsettling look at himself.

Sam's transformation resembles the kind of belated realizations Joseph Conrad's characters experience. The most obvious parallel is with the narrator of Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," a fledgling captain who, on the eve of his first voyage, extols "the great security of sea as compared with the unrest of the land" and rejoices that he has chosen an "untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose." Sam indulges a similar presumption. He wants nothing less than to take control of his destiny, and believes he can best do so by leaving civilized complications behind, finding his second chance beyond the boundaries of the fallen world. But his attempt proves as futile as that of Conrad's young captain. Turning from duplicity in others, both find themselves haunted by their darker - doubles. Sam is at last forced to recognize in his brother a version of the self he had betrayed and left behind ten years before. Despite the American dream of self-invention, Williamson suggests, we turn away from the past at our own peril. There's no future worth having unless we take responsibility for the past.

Williamson has done something refreshing in his novels. He has opened an unexpected region of realistic hope in American fiction when everywhere else an easy despair is the fashion. His characters arrive in Fontennelle disillusioned, expecting to purge their poisoned past and begin their lives over again, instantly and painlessly. Instead, they discover that genuine renewal is possible only for those willing to go through a painful rebirth that doesn't cancel the past but rather redeems it.