Author’s memories and research nail sense of time and place

“The rest of the country was worried about the Russians, worried about the Commies in our midst, worried about the Koreans,” says Cece, the narrator. “But Houston’s oil had washed its worries away.”

DiSclafani, the best-selling author of “The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls,” has never lived in Texas. She and her family reside in Alabama, where she teaches at Auburn University. But as far as she’s concerned, she might as well be a Texan.

Her parents come from La Porte, though they moved away a month before she was born, and DiSclafani spent her childhood summers crisscrossing Texas in the family car to visit relatives. In Houston, when they drove through River Oaks, she’d stand up in the back seat to gawk at the green lawns and sprawling homes. On trips to her grandmother’s farm in the Panhandle, she gazed out at the dusty landscape and endless horizon. Then they’d head home to Florida, which felt “the opposite of Texas” — crowded and unexciting.

“I understand what Texas is like, but I also understand why the rest of the country is fascinated by it,” DiSclafani said. “I’m a little bit on the inside and outside.” A shimmering city

“The After Party” is Cece’s story, but in this glittering world, it’s Joan who shines brighter than anyone else.

“Wherever she went, champagne flowed like a fountain,” Cece says. “She made people happy. She was beautiful, certainly, but she was more. She was lit from the inside.”

Cece and Joan become friends as little girls in River Oaks, and as they get older Cece becomes Joan’s “modernday lady-in-waiting, her sister in all but blood.” When her mother dies, Cece moves in with Joan and her family, further cementing their bond.

By their mid-20s, Cece and the rest of her circle have “fallen neatly into the ranks,” getting married and having children — everyone except Joan. Still, Cece clings to her best friend, trying to save her from the trouble Joan seems determined to find.

“Without Joan I would have been no one … a girl with a forgettable face, a forgettable name,” Cece says.

The women of “The After Party” are undeniably Houstonians. They belong to the River Oaks Garden Club and organize the annual Azalea Trail. They shop at Battelstein’s department store; their housekeepers shop for groceries at Jamail’s. Cece, like many Houston women, fights the humidity with hot rollers and weekly salon appointments.

Setting “The After Party” in River Oaks “just seemed kind of perfect,” DiSclafani said. “I mean, Houston was known to the rest of the country for being bigger and tackier than everywhere else. But River Oaks was this cloistered society; it had its own set of rules.”

They might have aimed for decorum, but DiSclafani’s characters have a new-money wildness that is unmistakably Texan.

“There wasn’t an old guard in Houston,” Cece says, looking back. “Our parents were it. We would have been laughed out of the society registers in most places in the country, but in Houston our names meant something, even if they only went back a generation.”

To capture the time and place, DiSclafani pored over photographs and magazines, studied the old River Oaks subdivision rules, even spent time with women who have lived in River Oaks for decades. She also consumed books about the oil boom.

“I wanted to get a sense of where these people were from, these people who became fabulously wealthy,” she said. “The money these people had — they were just looking for ways to spend it.”

Early in “The After Party,” Cece muses on the contributions of Glenn McCarthy, who built the spectacular Shamrock Hotel, and of M.D. Anderson, whose money founded the Texas Medical Center: “Mr. Anderson helped more people than Mr. McCarthy, certainly, but where did we have more fun?” Too far, too deep

“The After Party” hinges on the friendship between Cece and Joan, but it’s a friendship that goes too far, gets too deep.

“I wanted to follow somebody down that dark tunnel,” DiSclafani said. “How far is she going to go for Joan? And what is she willing to lose for Joan?”

DiSclafani’s first book, “Yonahlossee,” covered similar territory, she said, “but it was about a romantic relationship.” This time, DiSclafani found herself fascinated by a type of friendship that seems to belong to an older generation.

“People didn’t move so much in the ’50s,” she pointed out. “These women were born together, they were children together, they were teenagers together, they got married together, they watched their children grow up together, they had grandchildren together. That experience fascinated me.”

As easy and enviable as that life might seem, though, DiSclafani saw the catch: “That world depended so much on everyone doing the same thing and wanting the same thing — especially if you were a woman.”

“The After Party” celebrates the appeal of “all these people, all this noise, all the smoke and shimmer.” It exposes the dangers lurking in a world that depends on falling into line and keeping up appearances. Above all, though, the story plunges us deep into a dazzling, decadent time and place — a world in which a Texas wildcatter could spend his millions to build a towering hotel and decorate it in 63 shades of green, and the city’s elite would come to bask in its gaudy splendor.

“The snobs from Dallas might have called it the Damn-rock, but we were proud of the Shamrock, which was emblematic of everything about Texas we held dear,” Cece says. “It was bigger and better and brasher, and of one thing we could be absolutely certain: there was no other place like it in the world.”

“The money these people had — they were just looking for ways to spend it”