Two Southerners have published novels about the American Revolution this season. Robert Morgan is a poet who teaches at Cornell University, and Jimmy Carter is an ex-president who builds homes for poor people, and they bring their respective sensibilities to bear on these stories. The enormous audience for Civil War fiction may discover that this earlier conflict holds just as much interest.

The Hornet's Nest is being marketed, apparently without irony, as "the first work of fiction by an American president." (Surely, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton must feel slighted!) But true to the honest man's reputation, this isn't really a work of fiction, or if it is, it just barely is. Any number of history textbooks could benefit from the president's congenial storytelling style, but his narrative - so measured, so detailed, so utterly free of psychological insight or wit - wears its cardigan sweater through all 450 pages.

Carter follows the travails of a quiet frontiersman named Ethan Pratt. With an earnest new wife, the young Philadelphian leaves his father's cobbler's shop to follow his dynamic brother to new opportunities in North Carolina.

Ethan wants only to work hard, mostly alone, and build up his farm, but Henry, his brother, can't resist politics and the spirit of discontent sweeping through the colonies. Ethan warns his brother against the dangers of radicalism, but Henry admonishes him not to imagine he can remain aloof from the changes that must come. The tragedy, of course, is that they're both right.

Far from the usual perspective of Philadelphia and the other Northern colonies, "The Hornet's Nest" provides a particularly illuminating history of the revolutionary conflict in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. It was a savage mess that should give pause to anyone hoping to implement democracy in a conflicted country.

Like a good lecturer, careful to make sure everyone follows along, even in the back, Carter demonstrates the divided reactions of the colonialists, most of whom simply wanted to live their lives without being exploited by London cronies or looted by rebel zealots. He's particularly helpful in his explanations of how Quakerism played into the debate, how slavery complicated the politics, and how the British tried to manage the Indians as allies in battle, a tactic that terrified the colonialists and encouraged their tendency to demonize the natives.

But the narrative plods without a note of subtlety. Over and over again, characters seem to turn away from each other toward us, pick up a piece of chalk, and begin

lecturing about the intricacies of their political, economic, or agricultural situation. They ask loaded questions, write reports, or conduct debates that have all the life of those "spontaneous" panel discussions at corporate meetings, e.g. "What is the difference between people who live in England and those who live here?" or "Now let me speak a word about taxes."

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