BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Where ‘Normal’ Is Dying for Being Black : BLACKER THAN A THOUSAND MIDNIGHTS <i> by Susan Straight</i> ; Hyperion $21.95, 388 pages

Call him the YBMWA.

Young Black Man With Attitude.

He’s one of the main characters in Susan Straight’s latest novel about African American life in the Inland Empire, though, strictly speaking, he doesn’t exist. He’s a shadow, a ghost. He’s the stereotype that the young black men in the book wrestle with, try to evade and sometimes--drawn like moths to flame--suicidally embrace; he’s the lens through which almost every white person views them, no matter how clean-cut or hard-working they may be.

Take Darnell Tucker. He first appeared in Straight’s debut story collection, “Aquaboogie.” Now he’s 20, a part-time firefighter in the San Bernardino Mountains, with a semester of junior college, a pregnant bride-to-be and hopes of a permanent job. The only black person at his station, Tucker must constantly deal with others’ views of him as exotic--while digesting a life experience that has been different. Even to a boss who likes him, he has to explain:

“Normal is I’m on the street at home and some brotha step to me cause he think I said somethin, so he pop the trunk for his shottie (shotgun). . . . Normal is I go out (get killed) cause of somebody else. Nothin to do with me.”

Home is Rio Seco, a stand-in for Riverside, Straight’s hometown. Marietta Cook, the heroine of her last novel, “I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots,” lives offstage here with the poet Roscoe, another “Aquaboogie” character, who partners Tucker’s father in a tree-trimming and yard-cleaning business.

Rio Seco’s African American community is close-knit, rich in tradition, but threatened by more than drugs and gangs. The high-paying defense jobs that lured blacks from Louisiana and Oklahoma during World War II are drying up. Latino immigrants compete fiercely for lesser jobs. Asians own many of the stores. Frustration hangs over the city as palpably as the heat and smog.

When state budget cuts put Tucker’s firefighting dream on hold, he hunts for work to supplement wife Brenda’s clerical job. Nothing much turns up (except for a boyhood pal’s offer to be a drug courier). Tucker just wants to support his family, but the personnel officers who interview him see only the YBMWA.

Hired as a security guard, Tucker is mistaken for a criminal and mauled by a police dog. Walking home from a warehouse job, he is shot at by a Latino gang. Passing out flyers for his fledgling yard-care company--he has hired two Mexicans but shrewdly advertised the firm as “Asian”--he is hassled by cops who consider his presence in the suburbs suspicious.

Despite all this drama, “Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights” is a curiously undramatic book. It consists entirely of scenes, and without narrative to set them off, the effect is flattening. The big cast of characters is hard to sort out. Straight’s landscapes and people come at us in pointillist dabs of vivid detail; in an art gallery we could back up to get the big picture, but too often, in reading this novel, we can see only the dabs.

This may be partly our fault. Used to gangsta cliches, we may lack the patience for Straight’s nuanced, unsentimental portrait of a world that is marked but not exclusively defined by crack-smoking and drive-by gunplay. Her characters reveal themselves slowly, as real people do, by turns of phrase--Straight writes splendid dialogue--and by subtle shifts in relationships between father and son, husband and wife, parent and child. From Tucker’s mother-in-law to his doomed convict friend, Louis, to his infant daughter, Charolette, they ring remarkably true.

But partly, too, it’s because the combustible material in Tucker never quite ignites. Unlike the striking Marietta in “I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen,” he’s a kind of bland exemplar, an Everyman. Not an anti-YBMWA stereotype--he has his quirks, including an unsettling love of fire. And not a character we can’t believe in--there are plenty of young black men as bright and level-headed as Tucker, and their struggle to lead decent lives in these twisted times, as Straight shows us, is genuinely heroic. It’s just that a novel this long that puts out so much smoke ought to have a bigger blaze underneath.