Growing Up in Vichy France : LE PETIT GARCON, <i> By Philippe Labro Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (Farrar Straus Giroux: $22.95; 257 pp.)</i>

During this spring’s riots, my 4-year-old son made an unsettling connection. He saw dark-skinned looters on TV and, for the first time, spoke of “black people” as a category. Then he linked them with another category, “bad guys,” that hitherto had been restricted to clanking cartoon monsters and to the Foot Soldiers, mortal enemies of the Ninja Turtles.

“Are black people bad guys?” he asked.

He was as innocent as a 4-year-old can be, and it wasn’t his fault that the leap his mind had just taken was exactly the connection that throughout American history has caused the most grief. But it gave me the willies. It reminded me that a child’s moral education starts early, and often in ways the parents don’t intend.

I carefully explained to him that many of the looters weren’t black, and that there are good and bad people in all races. I still have no idea how much of this message got through.

Then he asked: “Are policemen and sheriffs good guys?”

I said “yes,” but knew that someday I’d have to amend that to “most of the time.” And I knew, too, that what counted in any case wouldn’t be my explanations, my words, but rather the example I set as he grew up. Would it be a good enough example to steer the kid straight?

The parents of Philippe Labro’s young narrator pass this test splendidly in “Le Petit Garcon,” the latest in a long line of books and films that contrast the innocence of children with the horrors of World War II.

It’s a natural, almost irresistible juxtaposition. Only in the 19th Century, some social historians say, did children begin to be considered innocent, worthy of special protection, something other than little adults. And this made the atrocities to which children were subjected in the 20th Century seem all the worse. What better laboratory than the early 1940s to study how the transmission of values--good and bad--from one generation to the next can be sidetracked, speeded up, slowed down, aborted altogether?

So we have Anne Frank’s diary, and the young scamps in “Hope and Glory” and “Empire of the Sun” who find in wartime a precocious freedom, and Gunter Grass’ stunted Oskar hammering his tin drum to drown out the rumble of approaching Nazism. At the dark end of this spectrum, we have the boy in Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird” wandering the moral wasteland of Eastern Europe, and Elie Wiesel arriving at Auschwitz to be snatched away from his mother and sister and to see younger children thrown into a trench of fire, an experience “which made of my life an endless night . . . which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live . . . which murdered my God and my soul.”

Labro, a novelist, filmmaker and journalist whose previous works include “The Foreign Student” and “One Summer Out West,” has written what may not be a memoir but certainly reads like one. The narrator, a boy of 7 or 8 when the war begins, is nameless, his family’s name is not given, and the town in southern France where most of the action takes place is unidentified. Moreover, this action is restricted--sometimes to the novel’s disadvantage--by what seems to be fidelity to the facts.

The narrator’s father, a financial consultant in Paris, is a congenital skeptic and pessimist. He foresees the collapse of France, buys a villa deep in the country and moves his wife and seven children there to keep them safe. What the youngsters experience as an idyll--soccer and rugby and bicycle rides, piano lessons, word games, fresh farm produce and “that universe of make-believe, that inability to see reality clearly that constitutes the privilege, and the weakness, of happy childhoods”--is actually an artifice constructed at considerable risk by their stern but gentle paterfamilias and his much younger, Slavic wife .

The father and a friend (whom the children nickname The Dark Man) use the villa to hide Jews and other refugees who are relayed to the Spanish border or resettled on neighboring farms. At first they must cope only with Vichy officials, such as pudgy Monsieur Floqueboque, whom the narrator recognizes as a collabo by his shifty eyes. Later, however, German troops occupy the nearby town, and a scar-faced SS general commandeers part of the villa as his sleeping quarters for a couple of months preceding D-Day.

The danger, obviously, is extreme, but the narrator’s parents hold it at bay. Once, when two men in hats and trench coats approach the villa, the mother recognizes “the bearing of men who know they have the power to do harm.” She and two children detain Floqueboque and a policeman outside while the Jewish woman they are seeking slips out the back door. Then the father arrives, and his “air of superiority,” his “subtle modulations of tone,” his self-command and quick thinking complete the rout. The authorities slink away.

Even the presence of the general in his house fails to dent the father’s dignity. When the Germans leave to oppose the Allied invasion of Normandy and hold a drunken farewell party in the villa, the only casualties are glassware (though the narrator tells us that one of the officers present may have ordered the massacre of the 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane, including women and children, a few days later).

Such editorial asides are one of the ways--none of them quite successful--in which Labro tries to overcome the central problem of this novel: a lack of suspense. The boy never grasps the danger. Nor is he ever seriously tempted to deviate from the values of his exemplary parents. Labro must rely on readers’ prior knowledge of the brutalities of the Occupation--which is no doubt easier to do in France--and on information the narrator picks up later. In any case, he interrupts the child’s-eye point of view that is the novel’s main accomplishment.

In France, still troubled by the dark collaborationist side of its wartime experience, the father must stand for everything the country wants to be proud of. Labro probes for the roots of this man’s virtue--not in ideology or religion, but in an orphan’s love of family and an intellectual’s ability to reflect on his experience and reach compassionate conclusions. Most people, the father says, simply think too little, too slowly, too shallowly. “What mattered most, in the end, (was) character.”

For us, however, this is a conventional, if lyrical, story of growing up in which the war plays a surprisingly minor role. Only once in a while does Labro manage to deliver the emotional goods we’re looking for--as when the boy, sleeping a few doors down from the general, suddenly fears that the Nazi is dreaming about him.

“If so, what was he doing with me? . . . In the dream of a man who commanded other men whom my father, my brother, Antoine . . . are fighting?”

In tears, the boy wanders down the hall and finds his father sleeping on a sofa, wrapped in a blanket, guarding the border between the Nazis’ part of the house and the family’s. And he goes back to bed comforted, believing that his father--the kind of father the rest of us wish we had, the kind of father we wish we could be--has “resolved to stand guard over my dreams.”