Suicide Is So Aristocratic : THE ANNA PAPERS <i> by Ellen Gilchrist (Little, Brown</i> : <i> $16.95; 277 pp. 0-316-77935-0) </i>

First let me say that Ellen Gilchrist has created some of the most remarkable spoiled-brat-but-beautiful girl characters who have ever been unleashed on Southern literature. These creatures have been terrorizing sheriffs, daddies and other Big Bubbas with wild displays of intelligence and courage through several masterpiece short-story collections, including the 1984 American Book Award Winner, “Victory Over Japan.” But now, in her newest novel, “The Anna Papers,” one of these neo-belles has hit middle age and her life, at the age of 43, has turned suddenly somber.

Forty-three years--time for life evaluation for Anna Hand, writer extraordinaire. Yes, the throat has begun to sag a bit and the chest to bag; still she finds herself slim enough to wear $250 pieces of tiny handmade French underwear to advantage, even with the bedroom lights on, so that a big-game hunter lover or macho young carpenter can rip them off her. She is filthy rich. She doesn’t really have to earn her money doing anything because there is so much of it floating around in her family. But she makes much more than the average writer anyway because she is also absolutely brilliant and all who read her books find out more about themselves. So she has certainly accomplished something. Even though she couldn’t have children, still they are in her family, and being a woman of Southern sensibility, she believes that children of sisters and brothers are her children too; it’s all in the DNA chains and the chains of names at the family cemeteries. And then she has had a string of incredible lovers, and while she reviews her life she ticks them off--names, sexual abilities, hotel rooms.

Yes, she has hit a certain peak. She has encountered her first lover who refuses to give his life over completely to her, and shortly thereafter she is diagnosed as having cancer. So after all, she deserves to commit suicide, doesn’t she? While she still looks good? Before the pain of mortality sets in? Which she promptly does, popping cyanide and drowning herself simultaneously in the book’s Prelude, before the story has even really begun, leaving the rest of her family and the rest of the pages to debate the effect of her particular solution to writing the final chapter on her life.

Gilchrist traces out the complicated relationships of a sprawling Southern family like nobody else can. All her characters come alive as individuals; at the same time they act as products of genes and sibling positioning. With a few deceptively simple lines, the artist Gilchrist sets each one in motion so vividly that soon the whole scene is swarming, the neighbors and friends and family slamming in and out of the doors through the wake to the climax of the funeral service, where the character vignettes become like the gems of stained glass that Anna’s father fixes his eyes upon. There is the littlest girl, Chrystal Anne, worried because she had to wear brown shoes; the teen-ager James-Junio, happy for the excuse to be out of drug rehabilitation; the drunken sobbing acquaintance; the old lover who, by the end of the service, has found some solace in inheriting the writer’s cousin LeLe as a sexual partner, and the half-Cherokee niece Anna had brought, in the last months of her life, into the family fold.

Well, when is it appropriate to commit suicide? The question itself is offensive to many. But in the last days of a declining century, it has become a recurring refrain of both life and fiction, when the most beautiful and talented do it, the wealthiest and the most impoverished, the teen-agers attempting to do it, the homicidal/suicides because of bad lovers or bad grades--because Marilyn Monroe did it, or Ernest Hemingway, or John Belushi asking for it. This is the debate Gilchrist sets loose in the large family Anna has left behind.

The advance notes for this novel describe it as a celebration of love, life and life’s many options. But maybe I came too late to the party. Instead I see a woman passed out on the floor of the ocean, drunk with fear of pain and the loss of beauty, allergic to wisdom, addicted to the first scenes of love and dissatisfied with anything older. I see a woman so carelessly wealthy that she buries her gold pieces and leaves a cute map for her rich relatives to decipher so that they can add them to their own hordes. I see, instead of life’s many options, a poverty of imagination, a woman who wants to freeze the frame, too afraid to advance in any direction, so spoiled that when love is withheld from her for the first time she lets her obsession take over her body. As she whispers in the ear of her married man after love-making, “It’s like cancer.”

I know I am severe, but Gilchrist has pulled it out of me. She asks for it in the very frame of the novel, allowing Anna to make her final splash in the beginning so that the rest of the book forms a choral response to the strong leading voice that Anna Hand represents. (I like, by the way, all the different novel forms our women writers have been inventing since that early pioneer in form, the famous old suicide Virginia Woolf herself.) Hence the choral response, with the final word given to her more domestic sister Helen, who declares that the human race wouldn’t have made it this far if someone wasn’t having fun at least part of the time. But for my final judgment, I’ll quote a woman from a Paul Simon song who reminds us that there are more than 50 ways to lose a lover. Or a cancer. And this Anna Hand, though supposedly brilliant, has chosen one of the saddest, no Ode to Joy.