Dixie in the Blood : SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE <i> By Nancy Lemann</i> , <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 223 pp.) </i>

“Sportsman’s Paradise” features the most gallant 3-year old in world literature. Al Collier is spending the summer with his brother, sister and assorted caretakers in a compound of summer houses on Orient Point, Long Island. His parents are in New Orleans, his hometown, while his father dries out. The narrator and main character, Storey Collier, a journalist from New Orleans who is working in New York City, spends her weekends at the compound keeping an eye on the children at their parents’ request. Al, the 3-year-old, wants to marry his cousin Storey and is always saying things like, “I want to be in your life. Wait for the little boy who loves you.” Al ranks people by whether or not they like coleslaw. Storey ranks people by comparing them to Al, who possesses a sense of personal responsibility for others far beyond his years. He says of a playmate, “I’m trying to show him how to do the right thing. I tried to help him but he’s very wild.” Al becomes for Storey a touchstone for human decency. She explains, “Not only is it rare in life to make what is called an actual ‘connection’ with a person in the first place, but for that person to be essentially kind, so kind as to notice and seek out a sufferer, or someone in trouble, and then extend to him his aid, seems to me the most hopeful thing I can think of in life, and of course, also the most rare.”

Another guest at the compound is Hobby Fox, former pro baseball player, current world-news editor at Storey’s newspaper, crony of Al’s father. He and Storey had become lovers several years earlier in Havana, but had parted over some “dishonor” that remains unspecified until the final pages of the novel. Hobby, whose father has committed suicide, is very stoical, which Storey maintains is characteristic of baseball players. They never smile when they hit homeruns, she claims, for the same reason that Grant forbade his troops to cheer at Appomattox: So the losers won’t feel even worse.

Hobby and Storey drift through the summer days on Orient Point in a haze of mute desperation, alleviated by baseball metaphors and ironic wit. “I miss everyone,” says Storey. “It’s strange since they’re all here.” The reader is alternately baffled, intrigued and irritated by Hobby’s and Storey’s inability either to get back together, to discuss why they can’t or to reveal to us what the past “dishonor” is that prevents this. Eventually, though, through their mutual concern for Al (who bravely says things like “I want to be with my Dad. I’m very proud of Dad.”), they wordlessly work their way through this stalemate.

Also at the compound are an assortment of displaced Southern eccentrics, many alcohol-soaked, most vaguely related. “The South is made up of vast networks of cousins, who are ceaselessly concerned about each other,” says Storey. “In New York no one could care less about you. That’s what I like about it.” The big difference between Southerners and Yankees, as Storey sees it, is that Southerners, tempered by their role as the perennial underdog, are courtly and witty lunatics, whereas Yankees are just lunatics. The South is, she says, “a more painful place than the North, a truthful place, a downtrodden place, with a certain constant adversity toward which the people are rather debonair. That is what strikes my heart, their elegance, in that adversity.” Or as one of the children puts it, Southerners are people who call everyone Sweetheart and Precious. (“Sportsman’s Paradise” could actually be read in this era of worldwide Balkanization as an amusing handbook on cultural differences between Southerners and other Americans.)

But a simple plot summary doesn’t do justice to this marvelously confident and accomplished novel. It is so unremittingly funny that only gradually do you become aware of the despair beneath the surface (another Southern trait). All the Southerners at the compound are falling apart for one reason or another, but in the most charming, entertaining, and uncomplaining fashion imaginable. (Denial, a Yankee would call it.) And the prose itself is like a high-wire act above an abyss. Latin American magical realism posits that the miraculous sometimes interpenetrates dreary or sordid daily reality, whereas Lemann, in keeping with the conventions of Southern fiction, portrays the miracle as being simply that any of us manages to survive from one day to the next, given the suffering, grotesquery and gratuitous violence of this world (a stance especially appropriate to our end-of-millenium present).

Jazz, Dixieland and blues are constantly playing in the background of this story, and the book itself is composed like an improvisation for a New Orleans jazz funeral. The distinctive voices of the various characters jump in and out like solos by the different instruments. Words and phrases repeat sporadically, gradually accruing loaded significance. And once you get into the rhythm, you can almost join in on the refrains. Lemann displays a gleeful and contagious love of language for its sounds and cadences. Storey speaks of jazz “with its dark gaiety, the instruments in languid unison, and yet the inexorability or steadiness of the beat in this old jazz is what strikes the heart, and the dark wit or cynicism of the music, a gaiety in dark conditions.” “A gaiety in dark conditions” could be the subtitle for “Sportsman’s Paradise.” It also sums up the Southerner’s particular style of joie de vivre, in contrast to the innocent optimism of various other breeds of Americans.

I had to keep putting “Sportsman’s Paradise” aside. I didn’t want to miss any punch lines, which come at you as relentlessly as balls from a pitching machine. Also I kept being overcome by homesickness. Though Southerners in exile often manage not to think about their homeland for entire days at a time, love for the place remains in the bloodstream for life. And like malaria, longing for it periodically lays you low. Lemann has gotten it just right--the sleaziness and wackiness and dignity of the Land of Lost Causes, that particular mix of sin and seediness, irony and idealism, that can be found no place else on earth. “Sportsman’s Paradise” should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the contemporary Southerner at home and abroad, and for anyone who wants to sample Southern fiction at its finest.