Tennessee Schmaltz : HARRY KAPLAN’S ADVENTURES UNDERGROUND <i> By Steve Stern (Ticknor & Fields: $19.95; 310 pp.) </i>

Harry is 15 years old in 1939 when he moves from Brooklyn to Memphis in the company of his parents and grandparents. The father is inept (a schlemiel ); the grandfather complains (a kvetch ); the mother gossips on the phone all day (a yenta ), and the shriveled old grandmother (a bubbe ) sits wordlessly by the window emitting a strong odor of fish. No wonder Harry has his nose in a book most of the time, lost in the adventure novels of H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Baroness Orczy. He longs for adventure of his own instead of the daily tedium of school and part-time work in his father’s pawnshop.

His chance comes when the death of his grandmother converges with the overflow of the Mississippi River. All the cemeteries are waterlogged so there is no choice but to stow Bubbe Zippe’s coffin temporarily in the pawnshop. The family is so undone that Harry is pretty much left to fend for himself, and thus begins his adventures underground. He hooks up with a pair of contemporary black twins, stealing away from home night after night to wander among the whorehouses, funeral parlors, gin mills and river dives of legendary Beale Street.

Novelist Steve Stern describes lowlife vividly: “Carrying unpaid hotel tabs into the rooms behind the Chop Suey House we saw men lolling like tent caterpillars in a network of crisscrossed hammocks. We got silly breathing smoke that smelled of burnt rubber and sour cream. At the forge on Vance Street we saw the blacksmith playing his bottleneck guitar for a white man who kept mopping his brow. . . . We saw a local undertaker sitting defiantly astride a man lying face-down on the sidewalk, his shirt slashed to red spaghetti.”

The twins live with their elephantine Aunt Honey, proprietress of a whorehouse called the Baby Doll Hotel. “There were cheesy chintz draperies through which the sunlight was sifted into a fine brown dust, brass cuspidors anchoring the corners of a woven carpet, floor lamps covered in veils of red gauze. . . . There was a neon clock, an enamel Dixie Peach calendar on a water-stained wall and a portrait of a gimlet-eyed Jesus with a rich golden tan. A footstool supported a phonograph playing a record of what sounded like a tomcat in the rain. Around the phonograph, relaxing in moss-grown wing chairs and sunk in a deep-cushioned divan, were several women of dusky hue.”

Harry inhabits a world that is spilling over in all directions. His hormones are raging as he wanders the Memphis ghetto known as the Pinch. His extensive reading has given him some unusual ideas about love and lust, and indeed, he finds satisfaction in a manner that is, to say the least, bizarre. This scene and many others have a mythic quality that intentionally stretches reality.

Stern displays a rich gift for putting words together and a sharp, ironic sense of humor. The manner in which he contrives to join black and Jew for all eternity is imaginative, horrifying and funny all at the same time. He is less adept at evoking the speech of the period. “Mistah Harry . . . I delight for yo honah to meet my gracious Aunt Honey, the very one have fetch I an my brother out of the bulrush. She’m the awful grand proprietricks of this fine stablishment, which is known far and wide as the Baby Doll Hotel.” More often than not, his efforts sound like something out of a minstrel show.

Dialogue isn’t the only disturbance in this area. Harry, as narrator, constantly refers to blacks as shvartzers . Sometimes we get eight ball or coon instead. The twins are called Lucifer and the Dummy. Other black characters are depicted as obsequious, sneaky, lazy and/or stupid. In all fairness, the Jewish characters don’t come off any better.

The higher aspirations of mankind don’t get much of an airing in this novel, but that appears to be Stern’s intention. He is writing about flood tide and overflow and exposure of what ordinarily lies buried beneath the surface. As a result, it is hard to care about any of these people, including Harry.

We get page after page of exotic description and almost no character development. There is no underlying thrust here as there is, say, in Huckleberry Finn’s push toward freedom. Harry just sees and records, albeit in an entertaining fashion.

For a while, Harry Kaplan’s adventures underground are rewarding. The author never fails to invent interesting sentences. The trip begins to pale, though, and eventually runs out of steam. Stern encapsulates the problem when he describes the fate of one of his characters:

“All his energy, it seemed, had been enlisted in the making of language.”