American Pie (2002)

''American Pie'' — Don McLean's Vietnam-era song — cuts deeper than Michael Lee West's third novel. Yet she catches the same mood of down-home sorrow. The McBroom sisters of Tallulah, Tenn. — freewheeling Jo-Nell, career woman Freddie, reclusive Eleanor — play out their predictable roles like a sitcom trio. Only their grandmother, Minerva Pray, a Texas farmer's widow, is a true original. (She admires her waiting tombstone. ''It was the only time I'd ever saw my name in print.'') There are recipes and food metaphors galore. A grieving heart shrinks ''to the size of a pimento.'' Small-town folk are ''crimping their lives at the edges like a fluted pie crust.'' The South itself is ''divided up like a dessert tray — pralines, divinity, fruit cake, sour grape pie.'' This kind of writing in American Pie goes down real easy, like your favorite comfort food. B+