Portrait of an Underclass That Missed the American Dream : DOG HORSE RAT<i> by Christopher Davis</i> Viking $17.95, 231 pages

In the little town of Whitehouse, in Upstate New York, white folks--entirely passed over by what we think of as the American Dream--live curious, schizophrenic lives. In the summer, their woods and meadows flower into the perfect pastoral resort. Tourists flock north from Manhattan and south from Canada: parasailers dot the sky, their finger lake is filled with happy swimmers. But in the winter, the rich go home, leaving Whitehouse citizens in their lonely farms, bare of paint; in their crowded and smelly motor homes.

People have lived here for years, as hunters and mountain men, as prison guards and prisoners. The families of Whitehouse and Bradford have dwelt here for generations. They are Americans, with all the promises that condition entails still fresh in their minds.

It hasn’t caught up with them yet--at least consciously--that the great waves of white domination and “Manifest Destiny” and “democracy” and so on passed over them a long time ago. They live in the trough behind the wave, and they’re destined to float there forever.

Within this dream, this delusion, young Royal West and his older brother, Van (who has been to Vietnam and isn’t, by any means, playing with a full deck), find themselves, just at the end of the tourist season, plundering an upper-middle-class vacation home. Royal worked here once a long time ago as an errand boy. He remembers that he quit this place because the father tried to boss him around. (Then later, he remembers he got fired for stealing some little notion or knickknack.) No matter. The son of the family blunders in, and Van shoots him. The story begins.

This is a story about the young guys you see in drive-in movies. Or the men you know who don’t turn up at your high school reunion, because instead of having gone to law school, they landed in jail. This is the story of waiters and truckers who talk big, who get into bar fights, who beat up their women, who have no skills, who never in a million years come up with either the respect or the love that every human being deserves.

This is the story about our parents--unless we were born lucky--or our children, if things don’t go right and we lose our jobs and our houses. The story of young men dying for love and living on scraps. This is also a story where the women do better because they were taught to expect nothing, and the men do worse, again because against all evidence they still expect the world and its general approbation.

OK. Van lives in his dad’s mobile home, with his fat wife and a new baby. Young Royal has a furnished room in a widow’s farmhouse with his nice wife Lou. Within hours, the story of the accidental murder goes around town. But small towns dislike outsiders more than they do murders, and so nothing is done about it.

Royal tells some of the story to some of his friends. Van tells some more of the story to some of his friends. But month after month goes by and “nothing happens.”

The murder hangs there like an invisible curse. Van leaves his wife, takes up with an Indian half-caste, beats her a lot. Cryptic conversations go down in the Antlers Bar, where everyone knows about the murder, but the entire condition of their daily life is denial, denial. Royal’s wife leaves him (but no one goes far in this close little circle). The seasons change. The winters are claustrophobic and unbearable.

It’s clear that everyone knows everything that’s going on, but nobody has the tools to deal with it. Van, who pulled the trigger, gets freakier and freakier, drinks more and more. The woods stay the same, and so does the lake.

This is a world where daily life is indeed the order of the day, and there is no escape from it. Royal and Van’s father did time in the local prison, their mother drank herself to death. Royal had a foster mother once who loved him. But . . . what’s the way out of this place, this life?

Some men dream of criminal acts, but that won’t make them understand books or buy them a home or get them to college. It really is just sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll for them. That will be their life, and that will be it. No wonder their rage is like a chronic disease, and rhetoric of the American dream sends them finally crazy.

This is a perfectly controlled book about young men desperately seeking control. The end is surprising and inevitable, and the novel has the depth of generations of sorrow and bravado striking sparks against each other and the pervasive schizophrenia of the enclosed life of the American underclass.

Next: “The Pinnipeds: Seals, Sea Lions and Walruses” by Marianne Reidman (University of California Press).