L iving in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock is a large book, more than twice as long as Butler's two previous novels combined, and it includes a cast so numerous that the author has his narrator formally introduce the principal members in the first chapter. Two characters are clearly central: Charles Morrison, 42, wealthy and powerful head of a prominent Little Rock law firm, and his wife, Lianne, 39, the former "Miss Little Rock" of the title and a former well-known Little Rock television personality. The couple are childless because Lianne had a partial hysterectomy at age twenty-one, and in spite of their relatively long marriage, they are still deeply in love. Retired several years from her television job as a result of overwork and stress, Lianne channels her energies into a variety of good causes, in the approved manner of the "modern Southern liberal." It is debatable which...