In the world of contemporary fiction, "Southern" is not so much a geographical location as a genre and a readership: Not being a member of the latter may impair your ability to appreciate the former. It seems unlikely that the rewards of Kaye Gibbons' sixth novel, On The Occasion Of My Last Afternoon, will rouse the enthusiasm of many readers born outside the old Confederacy. Narrated by its heroine, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, the book concerns the miseries and delights of a young woman born in antebellum Virginia who ultimately triumphs in spirit over an abusive father and the personal losses inflicted upon her by the devastating war her father's kind has unleashed. The novel proceeds over this heavily trodden ground with abundant vitality; the well-managed intrusions of High Southern Gothic violence keep things interesting, and Gibbons has an eye for the plausible grotesque. But it is difficult to credit her portrait of a South populated entirely by saints and demons, despite the crashingly Oedipal backstory she supplies to explain away the depravity of the chief demon, the heroine's father. The saints are the hardest to tolerate; Emma's husband and servant display less evidence of independent desire than a pair of well-trained mastiffs. Since the novel's moral distinctions are so obvious that even the dullest readers are unlikely to miss them, the frequent moralizing in which Gibbons sees fit to indulge her heroine seems too much like self-congratulation. The novel has been composed with admirable care, but at times the word choices stray so far from expectations that the author's sweat is more evident than the character's voice.