Romance Tradition Tinges Old-Fashioned Tale of Small-Town Life

This is an old-fashioned novel, written in lush, pre-Hemingway prose, set in a small Ohio town at the turn of the last century. Robb Forman Dew, who won a National Book Award for “Dale Loves Sophie to Death,” faithfully imitates the tone of American domestic fiction in an era that began with Louisa May Alcott and ended, perhaps, with Willa Cather.

Still, Dew is a contemporary writer, and it makes no sense to produce a novel about life before and during World War I without some added ingredient, some 21st century edge. Yet the omniscient voice that narrates “The Evidence Against Her” is inconsistent in this regard: Sometimes it delivers the knowingness we demand of it, sometimes not.

Dew begins the story in 1888, when three babies--Lily Scofield, her cousin Warren Scofield and her neighbor Robert Butler--are born within hours of one another. Growing up, they are inseparable, connected with an intensity possible only at a time when mass culture was rudimentary and children had to entertain themselves.

They assume that their “threesomeness” will continue into adulthood, though their vision of this state is never made explicit. Nor is the uneasiness of adults who watch them and think, “It isn’t natural, somehow.... Three never works out. There’s always someone left out.”

This is one of the times when Dew succeeds in saying more than her characters do. The unspoken sexual issue looms larger when Lily and Robert marry, then invite the heartbroken Warren, who has failed to realize until the actual ceremony that his own love for Lily is “doomed,” to accompany them on the second half of their honeymoon trip--ostensibly to console him for being odd man out, but in fact to assert that the threesome is unbroken, though no adultery takes place or is even consciously considered. The town of Washburn gossips and awaits developments, “because Lily and Robert and Warren were young then, and anything might happen.”

What happens isn’t what we expect. Lily and Robert and Warren, it seems, are too well bred to do what the novel demands of them: bring their desires up into the light. Less inhibited people are needed to keep our interest. These prove to be the Claytors. The wife, a transplanted Southern belle, is manic-depressive. Her husband, a local landowner and rising politician, beats her. The oldest child, Agnes, with her ripe figure and unruly hair, longs for an orderly household and a kind lover, and gets both when, fresh out of high school, she marries Warren.

This devastates Lily but in a muted way. The bubble of complacency that surrounds the Washburn aristocracy is unprickable. The war rumbles offstage, and the 1918 flu epidemic claims its victims. There’s a brief mention of “the problem of unionization” at the Scofield munitions factory, the town’s biggest employer, but social issues as such don’t exist. The only threats Dew’s characters recognize are unrequited love and unhappy marriages.

These are the preoccupations of the romance novel, and they both enhance and limit Dew’s achievement. She is very good at describing the emotional lives of people, for whom the emotional life is everything but at intervals her prose goes slack and seems no different from what a romance writer of long ago would have written.

Throughout “The Evidence Against Her,” we’re told more about Lily and Robert than is justified by anything they do. The title itself is a puzzler because no crime is committed--only Agnes’ very slight involvement in the accidental death of Warren’s alcoholic father, who has made advances to her. This novel moves slowly under the burden of too much unresolved buildup--a sign, perhaps, that a sequel is on the way.