The southern way of death.

Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral By Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays Miramax Books, 243 pages, $19.95

At least since 1976, when Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to win the Democratic Presidential nomination, many Southerners have labored in a minor industry producing guides to the kooky South, often to be found for sale at Stuckey's on the Interstate. Some of these books are explicitly written for non-Southerners, others are ostensibly for Southerners but with a sideways glance at a Yankee audience, but in either case they tend to be relentlessly cute. At worst they would be downright offensive if the group being described were one less easygoing than Southern whites, who seem resigned to being the object of caricature.

So I wasn't optimistic about one with this title. To my surprise, however, it turned out to be one extended, wry in-joke. Southerners can read it without cringing; non-Southerners should at least find some recipes they can use, even if (as usual) they have trouble figuring out when these Dixielanders are being serious and when they're spoofing.

Proper funerals, the authors point out, are something the dead have been waiting for all their lives. It is only right that they should have them, and this book tells you how to do it correctly, by the non-negotiable standards of Southern ladyhood.

The gist of the message is that a genteel Southern funeral is hardly the time or place for innovation. Of course the South, especially the deep South, has a reputation for resisting innovation in general. Whether you're talking about flower arrangements, hymns, liturgy, or funeral food, the right way to do things is usually pretty much the way it has always been done.

This is not to say that events don't go wrong. Floral telephones that say "Jesus Called" are at least as common in the South as elsewhere. But even the most uninhibited Southerners can be conservative where it counts. Cremation, for example, is a newfangled way to treat the dead, and, the last time I looked, fewer than 3 percent of Mississippi funerals involved "cremains." (The figure for Nevada was over two thirds.)

The authors' aesthetic judgments are unerring. When it comes to flowers, for example, roses are acceptable, flowers from the yard ideal. Carnations are tacky, and carnations with glitter are unspeakable. It goes without saying that the authors share, in a suitably ladylike way, the sentiments