Lasca Lewis's first novel is not about its alleged theme, the prowess of my parents' generation of Americans, for whom FDR prophesied a 'rendezvous with destiny.' Nor is it Roosevelt hagiography - only its preface is that. This novel is about women who succeed in the period between the World Wars, about marriages of convenience, and love matches too, which turn out well and badly, about the loss of the good old agrarian past, about the romance of work and moving to the great city, about that old devil, sex. Perhaps Amelia Earhart, whom Lewis describes as an aviatrix in this politically incorrect tale, would not disapprove the claim made at story's end by Kyle Saunders: "The men of his generation . . . had been strong, strong in a different way from their fathers. They had been strong enough to let their women fly." Well, maybe.

Set partly in a fictional Texas county along the Sabine River, the story spans years between 1919 and 1942. Shannon County, with its fictional town of Tanglewood, has a past out of the Grade B westerns. Progenitors of the Saunders family, owners of the Circle S Ranch, came East from West Texas in the 1870's and tamed the land, fighting Indians, outlaws, and rustlers. Contemporary history bears primarily on the ambitions and accomplishments of the three central characters, Beth Saunders, née Lacy, Fama Dalton, née Jones, and Tracy Reece, née Saunders. Beth's experience as the daughter of an abusive sharecropper illuminates her willingness to marry wealth and family. Fama's understanding of her brother's experience as a soldier in a black combat unit in World War I illuminates her desire to prevent her husband, a successful lawyer, from enlisting in the military before World War II. Tracy's experience with her wildcatter lover during the East Texas oil boom, as they work side by side and finally marry, resonates with old fashioned feminism.

But details are sometimes a problem for Lewis. One of her characters, Polly Saunders, collects "momentos." Lewis speaks of Benito Mussolini as "El Duce" and at one point alludes to estimates claiming four to fifteen billion U. S. unemployed in 1932. Later on she describes Fama Dalton attending Bishop College in 1933, in Dallas. Moreover, Lewis tends to treat details of ideological conflict, depression, and war like sound effects or window dressing. Nor do her treatments of Capone era Chicago and Roosevelt era Washington, DC have the authenticity of her use of Dallas, where SMU and Highland Park feel like SMU and Highland Park, where the characters attend football games at old Fair Park Stadium, run in and out of the Magnolia Building in the rain, have lunch at the Baker Hotel, and shop at Nieman's; or Henderson, where they collect leases, eat chicken fried steak, and watch the rapid influx of people as the discovery of oil by Dad Joiner transforms Rusk County.

Lewis misses an opportunity when she drops the tale of the 1920's Ku Klux Klan after a brief scene and fails to explore the terrible history of Jim Crow Texas. In spite of fairly copious use of almanac materials about the period, this novelist seems uninterested in the conflict and misery of the 1920s and '30s, distancing her tale, even in its truest representations, from such unpleasant matters, as in the stories of Beth's mother, who is almost used up by her abusive husband before he is murdered in a brawl, of Seth Jones, Fama's brother, who kills his unfaithful wife and her white lover and runs from the Klan, only to be killed himself in a Chicago riot, of Tracy's cousin, Leslie, who attempts an abortion and fails, then commits suicide, taking her first child with her.

The novel opens with the rape of Beth Lacy by her former fiancé, Marlon Young, who takes revenge as he loses Beth to Kyle Saunders, the scion of Shannon County's wealthiest family.

These events, however, serve primarily as background for Beth's happy marriage, the secrets she keeps (one of which is that her first child, Quinta, is Marlon's), and the reason she does not wish ever to venture far beyond the security of the Saunders family enterprise, fearing even a trip to New Orleans, "that terrible wicked city." Similar stories of sexual awakening are primarily rhetorical gestures, as when Tracy first encounters Dexter Reece:

Tracy marries the Dexter, who turns out to be a sensitive fellow after all.

Still, if this is not a politically correct novel, its dramatic voices often speak truly. Lewis's characters use expressions such as y'all, a'tall, this here, twas and twasn't, ain't, I reckon, damn near, fillin' station, flivver, scared shitless, female trouble, dog run, and epithets such as do gooder, flapper, womanizer, smart mouth, bamboozler, roughneck, roustabout, and hoochy koochy dancer with a sure ear for context. Women who are gold diggers, or not, wear bloomers and step-ins, wear their hair bobbed, blondined, and marcelled, play the vamp, pet, drink soda pop, go to speakeasies, are frigid, or not, stuck-up, or not. Men who smoke Lucky Strikes and wear jodhpurs refer to women as gals.

The Nova Generation is a pretty good read, even if it isn't truer than history.