BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : To Be Young, Gifted, Black--and in Love : URBAN ROMANCE: A Novel of New Yorkin the Eighties, <i> by Nelson George</i> , G.P. Putnam’s Sons; $23.95, 284 pages

It’s the most famous line in Satchel Paige’s “How to Stay Young”: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” That’s not the only bit of advice the great ballplayer imparted, however, for immediately preceding that passage he suggested readers “Avoid running at all times” (Paige, remember, was a pitcher).

Dwayne Robinson, the music-critic hero of this first novel by music and culture critic Nelson George, would have done well to heed Paige’s lesser-known admonishment, for he isn’t prepared for the emotional state to which his hurried ambition leads.

Dwayne ultimately learns that lesson in “Urban Romance”--but belatedly and ironically, while interviewing an old blues player for the book Dwayne has dreamed of writing. “I used to walk fast, just like you,” says the musician. “ ‘Cos I thought if I didn’t, the world would get away from me and I’d always be behind. Now I walk slow. Know why? . . . ‘Cos I know now it’s always gonna be ahead of me and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Now I enjoy the view.”

Dwayne, deep down, would like to slow down, but he can’t, for all kinds of reasons--because he wants to be a famous writer, because he fears deep emotional contact, because he hates the idea of falling into black yuppie (“buppie”) passivity.

And in any case, his ambition has helped him escape the Brownsville projects, go on to college, and--by the time this novel takes place in 1982--publish his work in such national publications as Rolling Stone, Musician and Essence. He’s wrestling, in short, with ambivalence, caught between the promise of mainstream success and pride in his ghetto roots, and he sees no easy compromise.

Dwayne has gravitated to writing about music because it promised him the chance to have things both ways--to give respect to African American music, as well as to get respect for writing seriously about it--but in search of that grail he has put his personal life on hold.

Dwayne’s ambivalence is brought to a crisis by his romance with Danielle, a middle-class, Yale-educated editor who believes Dwayne can indeed write a book but who wants more from him emotionally than he is able to give.

Dwayne’s personal and journalistic history bears more than a passing resemblance to Nelson George’s life, so it’s fair to say that “Urban Romance” is at least semi-autobiographical. That’s the novel’s strength as well as its weakness: George certainly has close personal knowledge of his material, yet inevitably tells a familiar story of a young man caught between love and work.

George outfits the novel with a number of auspicious subplots--the illicit affair between a prominent radical judge and Danielle’s law student roommate, the making and marketing of club-scene music acts, the emergence of African American neoconservatism in Harlem--but in the end they highlight the limits of the novel’s central plot rather than shore it up.

A black “Bonfire of the Vanities” this is not: Considering Dwayne’s interest in rap, one expects George will eventually force his hero to confront the issue of whether the personal is indeed the political, but in fact he sidesteps the question. Dwayne and Danielle emerge from the novel essentially unchanged, wiser no doubt but ready to pick up their lives at the very place we met them at the beginning.

Novels that don’t quite work are often more interesting than those that do, mainly because they are not seamless and seductive: Their fault lines and miscalculations are easier to spot and appraise.

“Urban Romance” is such a novel, an entirely likable book that suffers, at bottom, from too little authorial ruthlessness. “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is a classic because Tom Wolfe knew his characters in such depth and detail that he could pass judgment on them with conviction and credibility; “Urban Romance” is not because George gives almost all of his characters the benefit of the doubt, leaving us with no one to root for, no one to condemn.

George is too good a writer to fall into portentousness, a typical problem in first novels, but he’s also too much of a newsman to provide the sort of dramatic punch and structure that the most effective novels need.