The battles of Birmingham

In worse moments, we're made to endure Stella's sentimental analysis of race and class issues. Pulling into a gas station, for instance, Stella pities the attendant she's never seen before: "He has grown old, wasted his life bending and smiling. This job has broken his body and spirit. Stella hated what life had dealt this nondescript man named Ryder, how life had cheated him, left him ignorant, fit only for this, a greasy black rag streaming from his hip pocket. Grease the color of midnight splotched his blue trousers. Love his humanity, she enjoined herself."

It's entirely possible, of course, that a melodramatic, sheltered young graduate would speak and think like this, but throughout the book Naslund establishes no narrative distance from Stella, nothing to help us appreciate Stella despite her pompousness and naiveté. In fact, she's so impressed by Stella's "store of grief" and "her erratic heart" that she ends up unintentionally mocking the girl. Passages from Stella's diary - "This dim light filtering into my chamber swaddles me and asks for words" - are particularly embarrassing. When she remembers a college professor asking, "What is humor?" we can only regret that he didn't finish the lesson.

The night-school job brings Stella into contact with several other idealists, white and black, and the novel begins to cohere a bit once it stops trying to capture the entire city's trauma and concentrates instead on this modest academic program. There's Cat, determined to teach and maintain her courage despite a progressive neurological disease that keeps her wheelchair bound. Christine is a potentially interesting character trying to overcome her anger at white America. And Lionel Parrish, the principal, provides a study of a black man torn between his idealism and his lusts.

But other characters, particularly the evil Klansman Mr. Ryder or the good Christian Mrs. LaFay, seem to have stumbled out of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," stripped of their original passion, wearing only the thin garb of political correctness required of allegorical saints and monsters. Hefting this legacy of heroism and terrorism, Naslund rarely manages to force her characters beyond the clichés.

By the end, when Stella is engaged to a third (!) young man whom she barely knows, "she fears only that what is real - her life, her love - might be imagined." But the real tragedy here is that her life and her love - and the lives and loves of all these people - have not been imagined deeply enough.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments toRon Charles.

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