This novel is the story of the girlhood and coming-of-age of Margaret Gower, the daughter of an Episcopal priest in a small Virginia town. In many ways it seems like a tale from a bygone age, with its gentle and dutiful protagonist and her kind, learned father who nevertheless leaches enormous doses of moral support from her.

The town of Romulus, Virginia, too, seems to slumber in an earlier time. It still boasts formidable church ladies, their prideful gardens, and a speakeasy in the black district where mildly daring white teen-agers go to hear the blues.

But not even Romulus is immune to new currents stirring American life in the last third of our century. Father Gower's particular crosses are the 1979 revision of the Prayer Book, and the developer who seeks to destroy a cor ner that holds the church's historic stone crucifix. He copes by...