BOOK REVIEW : The Certitudes of Life Thrive in Memphis : MEMPHIS AFTERNOONS: A Memoir <i> by James Conaway</i> ; Houghton Mifflin $21, 211 pages

James Conaway and Elvis were contemporaries. But not close friends. “The girl next door to me,” Conaway writes, “had a friend who dated a boy who had once been the backup driver for Elvis on a trip to Paducah.”

This finely wrought memoir describes growing up in Memphis before Graceland turned into a shrine and Martin Luther King became a martyr. During the time Conaway was a boy until he left for good in the ‘60s, Memphis was primarily a city that was very sure of itself. A place, as he writes, that possessed “comfortable, absolute certitudes.”

Conaway was born in 1943 while his engineer father was in the Pacific with the Seabees. As his book begins, Conaway is an adult, a published author and Washington Post reporter, going home to see his father, now slowly losing his mind to Alzheimer’s.

Readers who have moved away from any hometown will recognize Conaway’s sequence of emotions on going back: “anticipation fractured by present reality and the unfulfilled promises of childhood, vague but tenacious, and the observation that home has not been sufficiently chastened by one’s absence.”

Conaway’s father left college in 1929 when the family business failed, and he could never count himself a success. His engineering skills were applied to a humdrum job air conditioning Memphis office buildings.

The Conaway family lived on the fringes of respectable society; they didn’t belong to a country club. Conaway’s father did take the time to teach his three sons how to shoot pool and a .22 and to introduce them to the satisfying pleasures of fine carpentry.

By example, he taught the Southern code of drinking. “The idea was that good things followed if you knew what and how to drink,” Conaway writes, “and kept in practice.” His father kept a quart of sour mash in his office desk.

“I often saw him extract and uncork a bottle on a tedious afternoon, an act that required neither apology nor explanation.” Men of that era could be forgiven almost any behavior, violent as well as impolite. If they’d been drinking, the unwritten code went, it wasn’t their fault.

The other important male figure for young Conaway was Bud, the outlaw Southern male. “My father liked Bud but pointed out that he wasn’t ‘going anywhere,’ that hunting and fishing four and five days a week was excessive even by Southern standards.” Bud lived in a shack floating on empty oil drums, tethered to an island in the Mississippi, and poached game from the nearby preserve for Coca-Cola executives.

On the female side, Conaway was influenced by one not very bright sexy girlfriend, by one very bright sexy girlfriend and by his mother. On her side, Conaway’s grandfather was J. P. Alley, political cartoonist for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Alley won a Pulitzer Prize in the ‘20s for cartoons critical of the Ku Klux Klan. More troubling to his grandson, he created a cartoon character named Hambone, a poor black man with some folk wisdom but less eloquence than Uncle Remus.

Interestingly, establishment Memphis was neither proud nor pleased when Alley won the Pulitzer. The communal belief was, as Conaway puts it, “The pressures of life produced sad, even tragic results, but there was nothing necessarily wrong . To suggest that Klansmen had an imperfect appreciation of the rules of jurisprudence was to invite Yankees with funny names to take advantage of the situation and award a prize for disloyalty.”

“Memphis Afternoons” is not so much one boy’s story or even one family’s history but more the description of an atmosphere. It was a hot place with some bizarre tropical rites.

Far and away the strangest institution was the fraternity. Pre-college boys pledged as Memphis Taus had to acquire their own instruments of initiation. To the midnight ceremonies they brought a dozen wooden paddles, a gallon of used motor oil, five pounds of sawdust, a quart of molasses, a dozen eggs and a bag of elephant dung.

The initiation was quite literally torture, and it strikes the reader as bizarre that it was his mother who willingly drove the 15-year-old to the zoo to get the sack of elephant offal that would be the “soft, noxious climax of all our social ambition.”

Conaway’s mother’s motives and moods are mysterious to him still. Her life was colored by a sadness that verged on hysteria. In one of her letters to her husband away at war, she writes, “I get uncontrollable fits of shaking and throbbing and get frightened and can’t stop it--and the only release is to get fervently interested in something. . . . I may spend a little money on the house, and a little money on some clothes--and have a little fun. Forgive me--but our future happiness depends on it.”

A puzzling disease that required repeated surgery caused her to disappear from her sons’ lives now and then.

“Memphis Afternoons” isn’t a tale of a trapped boy managing to escape like Dickens’ “David Copperfield” or Tobias Wolff’s “One Boy’s Life.” It’s not the story of a boy who is desperate; it’s more a fine description of cultural surroundings--the social topography and weather. A memoir like this reminds us that it’s worth the trouble to look at our first 20 years. As Conaway writes, modestly and wisely, “It is so easy to get things wrong, to enhance; and yet to underestimate the force of the past is a worse failing.”