A Whole Life in a Shoe Box : Stops at the moral crossroads along life’s bumpy road : CHOICES, <i> By Mary Lee Settle (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: $24.95; 376 pp.)</i>

“Three o’clock in the morning,” in the world of Mary Lee Settle’s new novel, “Choices,” is the term for a moral crossroads. And there are plenty of those in the 60-odd years the novel spans--plenty of crossroads and plenty of roads. Characters are driven by a certain unpredictable wind of moral imperative that takes them where the action is.

Young Melinda Kregg, raised to be a Southern belle in 1930s Richmond, Va., with her yellow Ford roadster and crepe de Chine shimmy, by Page 62 has been thrown out of the Red Cross for aiding striking coal miners, by Page 86 is in jail with Communists and cooties in her hair, by Page 101 has finished Katie Gibbs and is in motor mechanics school in “Brooklyn, a place where people understood if you had to go to Spain” and by Page 112 is indeed driving a lorry in civil war-torn Spain.

By the novel’s end she has also outlasted two marriages, the first to a British aristocrat-doctor named Tye, whom she adores and feels she communicates with after his death, and has adopted two children: Maria, a Spanish war orphan, and later Aiken, a Southern black teen-ager who has been sent north for an education at the New York State college where the now 50ish Melinda is employed as social dean.

In between Spanish carnage and American civil-rights struggles, there is World War II--with blackout curtains and air raids in London--and Melinda does war work. Finally it is an unconventional blood relative, Melinda’s eccentric deceased Aunt Maymay, who gives Melinda her last, dearest home, a villa on the Italian island of Santa Corsara. Here, at the age of 82, Melinda puts her affairs in order and, having dealt with everything but “an old shoebox from Delman’s,” dies. (The death occurs in the prologue, so nothing is given away.) The shoe box has been in Melinda’s lap; its contents scatter in the wind and “a polyglot of papers, keys, ribbons, pins, medals” provide our entry into a life and century defined for us by Settle as a continuum of moral choosing and political witnessing.

“You’re one of them gets pulled to where it’s at, ain’t ye?” observes Mrs. Hightower, a rooming house proprietress in Cumberland Gap, of the young Melinda. “My husband used to say you can argy all day but when you wake up at three o’clock in the mornin a thing is wrong or it’s right and you take to drink or do somethin about it.”

Mary Lee Settle is nobody if not a writer who does something about things. She has been typed as a historical novelist, a term we might imagine she’d dislike, even if she hadn’t said so publicly. What she is is a fine and solid American author, with British cadences, possessed of every skill and tool and sensibility necessary to the production of literature. She is best known for “The Beulah Quintet” (1956-1982), which traced 300 years of American history through several fictional West Virginia families, and won the National Book Award for “Blood Tie,” a novel set in Turkey. All her books make dizzying vernacular use of the real stuff of place and time and voice, and “Choices” is no exception. We learn things, reading Settle.

There are problems with “Choices.” As a character, Melinda is the victim of a problematic point of view, the third person that wants to be first . . . and so is never quite satisfactorily either descriptive or subjective. In addition, the mature Melinda’s backward-looking eye is ever-present, and often intrusive, skewing the emotional impact of the story. Having Melinda take the grown Maria on a driving trip to Spain to revisit both their pasts--in a novel already about visiting the past--is a creaky device. The journey back seems gratuitous--we were just there, and the years in between have passed too hastily.

Perhaps the most serious obstacle to the novel’s success is that for all her right-mindedness and heroism it isn’t easy to love, or even fully like, Melinda. Yes, she is Everygirl/Everywoman, but she’s without real flaw. Saltiness, short-temperedness, short stature and cooties are not flaws, at least not in this book. Melinda is human, but not, like a morally complex Hamlet, too, too human . . . so not human enough. This lack of depth would be less notable if the novel presented itself only as a series of historical tableaux through which our heroine moved, having adventures. But we are also asked to read it as an emotional journey, a memory story and for that we need more of a chance to identify with the rememberer. Something is not working in this novel; it makes an insufficient appeal to the reader’s imagination. There is a whiff of the general failure of propagandistic art.

Of course, this “failure” of “Choices” needs scrutiny. Surely Settle, whose past work shows that she knows how to create a seamless, even magical fictional world, is making a few choices of her own here. Melinda’s pathetically cheery Aunt Boodie’s exhortation, as Melinda leaves home for the Red Cross, to “Do everything!” might be the author’s charge to herself at the summing-up stage of a long, neither magical nor seamless career: Why play by the rules? Why hold back? Why not “do everything!”--even if certain conventional requirements of fiction aren’t met? Settle is most definitely “doing everything” in “Choices.” Just as Melinda in her ‘80s dresses wildly in purple T-shirt, blue cloche and red Kmart shorts, the novel of which she is the centerpiece wears literary motley.

“Choices” could be called a catchall novel, a late-career novel; it’s a shoe box novel, and Settle is really fairly straight with us about that. While as readers we may not be able to imaginatively inhabit the book as we’d like to, we can get a different kind of satisfaction out of it; we can at least tour it, as Melinda and Maria tour Spain in Melinda’s Jaguar; we learn about Spain, about what happened to people we meet there, about forgotten connections and origins--much as we would at the knee of a somewhat distractible, opinionated Aunt Melinda. Settle herself is a distractible and opinionated storyteller, but what opinions! We have few authors in the current American pantheon to compare her with, and, as if we had suddenly become her kin, her nieces and nephews, she charges us in our turn with the responsibility of listening and paying attention to all she has to tell us, in her way, about our century and our historical selves. “Choices” is well worth reading, but more important, its fluttering bits and pieces, profusion of characters and welter of spirited voices point back to Settle’s whole body of work--the actual life, too big for a shoe box.

As for the language of the book, when Settle’s writing is bad, it’s hasty, rote and sentimental. But when it’s good, it’s as true as can be. Says a certain Kentuckian Grandma Haycroft, describing a family scalped during the Indian wars: “They was just settin thar of an evenin when the Cherokee come. My great grandpa tole my pa they found them still asetting in front of their cabin in the cool of the evenin right down thar where the company store is now. Just settin that without their hair on. They’d been eatin chestnuts, and my great-grandpa tole my pa they had to warsh the chestnuts out of their mouths when they berried them. We was all berried uphill from here, still are. . . .”