["Crimes of the Heart"] is a comedy of private disasters among three sisters in Hazlehurst, Mississippi…. The sisters—walking wounded, who are in tears at one moment and giggling and hugging at the next, ordering birthday cake and making lemonade—are very much of the South, of Mississippi, and Eudora Beth Henley 1952– Wide World PhotosWelty has prepared us for them. Lenny, for example, has already started to bristle and take offense, and, were it not for the happy circumstances of the story (her sisters urge her to get in touch with an old beau whom she sent away because she knew she could never have children; he, it turns out, doesn't want children), could herself have ended up living at the P.O.

The story is the least of it anyway. In scene after scene, the sisters reveal themselves and their emotions and their wavering desperation, and...