OUR FATHER’S HOUSE by Stephen Longstreet (Putnam’s,...

OUR FATHER’S HOUSE by Stephen Longstreet (Putnam’s, $17.95). It’s a disturbing introduction to the 1920s for the Fiore family when beloved Uncle Ramon takes a walk on the A deck of the Mauretania and keeps right on going into the black bowels of the Atlantic below him. Thus, does Longstreet begin the sequel to his well-received “All or Nothing”--thrusting the colorful, West Coast banking firm headed by patriarchal George Fiore into the gin-soaked, free-wheeling, turbulence of the ‘20s. Both directly and indirectly, the puzzling mid-ocean suicide of the heir-apparent to the far-flung Fiore enterprises impacts all of George’s descendants, but none more so than grandson Gregory who, prematurely, finds himself being thrust reluctantly into the No. 2 role in this multifaceted family of achievers and underachievers. A beguiling storyteller who indelibly fleshes out his characters with an admirable economy of words, Longstreet has a high old time as the varied members of the Fiore family find themselves knee-deep in the opening of Texas’ first oil fields, as one of the first Hollywood producers of talkies, and ultimately--in a country whose economy is rocketing, out of control--as the embattled defenders against a consortium of Wall Street take-over sharks. As a follow-up to his earlier chronicle of Italian immigrant, George Fiore’s, success in shaping a San Francisco financial empire out of nothing, “Our Father’s House,” as they would have said in the ‘20s, is a “doozie” of a story.