Rubio’s tragedy in the piney woods   Talk about a dysfunctional family! Dalia Miller, the title character of Gwyn Hyman Rubio's stunning second novel, "The Woodsman's Daughter," is the only survivor of her family of four: her father, Monroe, a self-made entrepreneur in the turpentine business of the South Georgia piney woods who is haunted by a sexual indiscretion that may have infected him and his family with syphilis; her withdrawn, drug-addicted mother, Violet; and her blind sister, Nellie Ann, whose half-life is finally cut short by the grotesque flowering of her father's earlier philandering in Savannah. This is a big book in the way that epics are big -- in characters, in themes, in setting, in conception and execution. It is a multi-layered story of the tangled webs of three generations of the Monroe Miller family beginning in the aftermath of slavery and the Civil War and continuing into the 20th century. It is the complex story of dreams realized and shattered, patterns repeated from generation to generation, soothsaying servants, promises made and broken, absentee parents, ailing marriages, botched abortions, gothic and voodoo episodes, the grand passions of love, hate, and revenge, and, finally, bare survival. It is a story divided into three parts named after Monroe, his daughter Dalia, and his granddaugher Clara Nell. Monroe's section chronicles the rise of the poor-white father from abject poverty through hard work and determination to wealth, a trophy wife, a mansion and two daughters who are beginning to detest him for bringing a curse upon his family and for his heavy drinking and boorish ways. Part two follows Dalia after the deaths of her parents and her sister, as she moves to a nearby town and tries to build a new life. She marries an effeminate but sexually demanding dentist and has a delicate son and a headstrong daughter, the carrier of the family curse, whose sad destiny is worked out in the third part. All the principal characters are fully fleshed and endowed with intellect and conscience. Like William Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, the doomed protagonist of "Absalom, Absalom!," Monroe is fatally and willfully flawed, and he broods about it. He knows that a woodsman can make a mistake when tapping a longleaf pine for its sap and simply move on to another tree. "It wasn't a mistake with consequences lasting forever. ... But a slipup with a painted woman was another thing altogether." Despite her prodigious musical talent, his blind daughter carries the curse and is a constant reminder of his guilt, "the fruit of his loins, the birthmark of his shame." But this novel is Dalia's story from beginning to end, first as a conniving survivor in the confusing self-destruction of her family; then, as an independent, self-centered woman rising in the world and learning to work everything and everyone to her advantage -- not unlike her fictional Georgia cousin, Scarlett O'Hara. She is possessive and cold to her two children, Clara Ann, who finds a feminist role model in Savannah in Cousin Juliet, and Marion, the sissified son who attends Georgia Tech, finds a wife and fathers a son on whose shoulder the fate and future of the Miller family will rest. This American tragedy with a Georgia accent is set in a world wondrously created and mastered by Rubio. She knows her south Georgia piney woods inside and out -- the rough, masculine world of turpentine farming, the drinking and gambling, cockroach racing and the visits to a run-down Valdosta hotel. We learn a lot from her about the turpentine camps and the hard-working laborers, black and white, who wear flour sack shirts, the "pullers" and "dippers," who tap the pines of their sap, which is rendered into turpentine, tar, pitch and varnishes, and make a generous $2.10 a day; and sometimes eat cracklin' bread and drink a poor man's beverage composed of grapefruit juice and cornmeal mash. She knows the landscape of pine thickets, pecan groves, gallberry bushes, and wiregrass. She knows the looks and sounds of horses and mules, wagons and carriages, and trains in a time before cars and indoor plumbing, electricity and air conditioning to tame the broiling heat of long summer days. With economy and pin-point accuracy, Rubio creates details that can deftly describe a small steamer riding out a storm on the Snake River or the interior turmoil of Dalia when she sets the fire that destroys her father's stable and his favorite horse. Furthermore, she can create ordinary Georgia crackers who have the capacity to be the perpetrators and victims of tragedy. In Rubio's hands the traditional novel has been deconstructed and remade as a fit vehicle for our time. If "Icy Sparks," her first novel, and "The Woodsman's Daughter" are indications of works yet to come, Gwyn Hyman Rubio has the makings of a major American writer. [The reviewer, professor emeritus of English at Bellarmine University, is editor of "The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Blue Grass."] Wade Hall - Special to The Courier-Journal, November 20, 2005