Coming of Age on Canarsie : BROOKLYN BOY <i> by Alan Lelchuk (McGraw-Hill: $19.95; 298 pp.) </i>

From Jo Sinclair to Alfred Kazin to Chaim Potok to Neil Simon, scores of skillful scribes have chronicled the pangs and pleasures of coming of age in Brooklyn.

Alan Lelchuk’s hero, Aaron Schlossberg (surely Lelchuk’s alter ego), grows up a “Brooklyn Boy” during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Lelchuk interweaves Aaron’s story with the story of Brooklyn itself, its history, its landmarks, its schools, its diversity, and above all the mystic significance of Ebbets Field and the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers. On this subject, Lelchuk’s eloquence could give the most complacent Angeleno a major guilt trip. How could we have stolen away the Dodgers from that sacred shrine, that magical homeland of True Believers?

The special charm of “Brooklyn Boy” lies in its complex format. Each chapter stands on its own as an individual short story, essay, vignette or (in the case of the Dodgers) lyrical evocation. Strung together, these diverse segments form an intricate mosaic of a time, a place and a youth who desperately needs to belong and desperately needs to escape.

In “On Home Ground,” a book for young people, Lelchuk wrote of Aaron Schlossberg as a 9-year-old. “Brooklyn Boy” recycles material from “On Home Ground” and pairs it with more sophisticated new material depicting Aaron’s teen-age years.

“Brooklyn Boy” retains some aspects of the “young adult” novel. It deals with a common theme of the genre, the youthful protagonist’s agony over the acrimonious breakup of his parents’ marriage. It also features, typically, a teen-age hero who makes mistakes and learns from them--constantly and painfully.

Aaron, in short order, learns the pitfalls of too-early sexual encounters, of drink, of pool-hall hustling, of card sharks, of call girls. After he’s attacked by anti-Semitic thugs, he learns respect for his rescuer, a painfully foreign Orthodox rabbi whom Aaron had previously despised. From a literary critic who patronizes the Manhattan used-book store where Aaron works after school, the boy learns he can aspire to college, to travel, to a writing career. Moreover, when Aaron feels overwhelmed by his failings, the critic confides his own painful moral crisis, teaching the boy yet another important lesson: that self-doubt is not unique, that the rich and famous also suffer. . . .

Some of this is as simplistic as it sounds. However, Lelchuk’s multitextured style and his subtly crafted family dynamics certainly appeal to adult sensibilities. Irony and nostalgia, those most adult of attitudes, prevail. Aaron’s greatest conflict is with his Russian immigrant father, Herschel, an embittered Stalinist, contemptuous of all things bourgeois. Herschel, wedded to the old world, fights Aaron’s identification with the new world, with baseball, Saturday matinees, Fudgesicles and such addictive radio dramas as “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow.” Aaron feels an occasional glimmer of warmth for his father, who teaches him chess and proves in the Catskills that he can ride like a Cossack, but the boy sides with his long-suffering mother when she finally orders Herschel out of the house.

Still, in 1951, when two G-Men come to question Aaron about Herschel’s Stalinist activities, he strikes out at them and refuses to implicate his father. He also, with amazing and amusing results, fires off an angry letter to Lava soap, sponsor of his favorite radio drama, “FBI in Peace and War,” announcing that he will urge his mother to boycott Lava because real FBI agents behave like bullies.

Although disillusioned with G-Men, Aaron remains in constant thrall to the Brooklyn Dodgers. In a series of chapters, lyrical and loving, Lelchuk rhapsodizes over Ebbets Field (the Shrine); homespun Dodger announcer Red Barber; “butter-smooth” third baseman Billy Cox; the “four goodly creatures,” Pee Wee, Duke, Campy, and Gil; and, above all, Jackie Robinson, that “fabled dark creature,” impossible to humiliate, who “took his revenge within the lines and rules of the game.” Real life proves less heroic. Aaron’s mother brings home a lover who, unlike Aaron’s father, shares the boy’s all-American ideals and standards. Aaron, of course, cannot accept him. Eventually, toward the end of his senior year at high school, Aaron takes a leave of absence and signs up as a deck boy on a Norwegian freighter bound for Africa.

Cruising up the Congo River, proud to be trusted at the wheel on his watch, Aaron knows he has severed all umbilical cords. And yet: “I thought curiously enough of my Brooklyn, and figured that, after all, home ground had prepared me well. . . .Not bad, I thought, as the thick jungle came wildly alive with calls and screeches, something like fans rooting in a crucial late inning. Not bad at all.”

And not bad at all is this coming-of-age novel. Its characterizations are uneven. It lacks consistency of tone. It lacks, too, the brilliance of Lelchuk’s critically acclaimed “American Mischief” and “Miriam at Thirty-Four.”