BOOK REVIEW: NOVEL : A Fictionalized, Haunting Look at a Real-Life Tragedy : WOLF WHISTLE <i> by Lewis Nordan</i> , Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $16.95, 308 pages

In 1955, when Lewis Nordan was a 15-year-old in Itta Bena, Miss., a famous lynching took place in the nearby town of Money.

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth visiting from Chicago and unfamiliar with the mores of the Mississippi Delta, wolf whistled at a white woman and paid for it: He was kidnaped from his uncle’s home at night, shot and thrown into the nearest river, tied to a 100-pound fan from a cotton gin.

The two white men arrested for Till’s murder were acquitted, in Nordan’s words, “without apology or logic or shame.”

The event sank into Nordan’s unconscious, taking on peculiar shapes and tones before it resurfaced. “The novel that I have written,” he says in an introductory essay, “is pure invention, because . . . my memory of the events surrounding the murder and the trial was very limited. . . .

“The big blank spots . . . were something of a blessing. . . . I was free to set my novel in my already invented fictional (town) of Arrow Catcher, Miss. . . .

“The more I wrote, the more I invented, including a population of vaguely magical animals. . . . It is a serious story . . . in which credibility is a key, but it exists on a plane, sometimes comic, even burlesque, just askew of the ‘real,’ historical universe.”

What Nordan is doing here is anticipating our fears, because we approach “Wolf Whistle” with trepidation, especially if we have read some of his previous work.

We remember how much trouble William Styron got into with an account of black history as straightforward as “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Nordan is running far bigger risks--a white writer much less well known, recasting history into his own antic, bluesy brand of magical realism, fairly begging for accusations that he is making light of tragedy.

Fans of Nordan’s last novel, “Music of the Swamp,” will have an additional fear: that Nordan’s way of singing about tragedy at the personal level will go prosy and stiff when he attempts a Social Statement.

Not to worry.

Nordan knows his world so thoroughly that the big events merge seamlessly with the small.

Except for a certain sobriety and restraint in dealing with the murder victim, Bobo (Emmett Till’s nickname), it’s the same world Nordan has shown us before: a world in which children suffer terrible damage from poor, drunk, violent parents and inflict similar damage on their children; a world full of love, humor and beauty that aren’t quite sufficient to heal anyone’s wounds.

Solon Gregg, the man who shoots Bobo, is as mean a racist as Central Casting could supply, but he is no stereotype. He kills out of a hunger for love, and now and then he realizes it. His chief pride is that unlike his father, who raped Gregg’s sister, he hasn’t molested his own daughter.

Why does “Wolf Whistle” succeed, against all odds? Nordan has an exceptional ear, a tightrope walker’s sense of balance and, most important, a decency so certain that it disarms us. His writing not only describes and evokes the blues, it works the same way the music does. It stylizes pain and evil to let us accept more than we could ordinarily bear.

The moment when Bobo delivers the wolf whistle is comic: The white woman--rich, emancipated and not insulted at all--has just scandalized the good ol’ boys at a slum grocery by asking for tampons. After Bobo is killed, his shot-out eye, dangling on his cheek, sees subsequent events with a Zen-like serenity.

“There is great pain in all true love,” says Alice Conroy, the idealistic young teacher who takes her fourth-graders to witness the trial. “We are all alone in the world.”

Nordan repeats these sentiments throughout his books. At first they seem to be fresh truths spoken with uncommon directness. Later they seem trite--evidence that Nordan is pushing too hard.

They are neither. They are simply refrains--the haunting, repetitive choruses of an old, sad song.