Hunted Down by Sadness : FICTION : THE WRECKED, BLESSED BODY OF SHELTON LAFLEUR,<i> By John Gregory Brown (Houghton Mifflin: $21.95; 257 pp.)</i>

An old man remembers, and the story of his star-crossed childhood unfolds. It pitches and yaws, much as the boy himself did after he fell from a towering oak tree and rose as a cripple who would never again walk a straight line down the streets of New Orleans. But still he kept moving, determined to reach a state of grace that seemed so far away in a world where God didn’t give with both hands.

“There are some that sadness hunts down,” the boy once heard a beloved elder say, and though the observation was made of another, it struck a chord in him.

“I’m one, too, you know,” the boy replied.

This is Shelton Lafleur, he of the wrecked, blessed body, standing before us as both a twice-orphaned child and a 70-year-old painter whose work lets him understand the vagaries of his boyhood. In his youth, he knew not where he came from. As an old man, he clings to his memories of those he has lost, even when it was his own actions that chased them out of his life. He is a melancholy figure, to be sure, but in melancholy there is the sweetness and the strength that make his story so memorable, so compelling.

To have any less a character spring from the pen of John Gregory Brown would be a resounding disappointment. Never mind that what we have here is only Brown’s second novel. He set a high standard for himself by stepping forth two years ago with “Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery,” a brave, lovely rumination on mixed blood and family torment. Suddenly, critics were calling him the latest in the South’s seemingly endless procession of fine writers. If William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor were around to read “The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur,” they would say that Brown has honored their legacy once again.

His prose possesses a simple beauty that recalls an age when evoking readers’ feelings meant more than having a novel optioned for a screenplay. So it is that we find fingers that are “moth-soft” and words that flow “as smooth and easy as a waterfall, crashing over Shelton as though his ears were the rocks down below.”

But the beauty of Brown’s writing never interferes with the truth he is trying to achieve. It only amplifies it, as when a wise old woman says, “There’s a million kinds of pain in this world, dear Shelton, more kinds and colors than form a lifetime’s worth of sunsets and rainbows. Watch out for them. Learn to tell one from the other. Learn just that and you’ll have learned enough.”

When Shelton Gerard Lafleur hears this wisdom, his life seems a blur of pain, spiritual as well as physical. At first the pain lurks beneath the surface, unnoticed by this black child who was sold as a squalling infant to a wealthy white man. The woman he calls mother for the first eight years of his life is the white man’s crippled daughter, who can never have a baby of her own. The difference in the color of their skin never occurs to Shelton until the fateful day in 1926 when he falls from that oak in New Orleans’ Audubon Park. His bones are broken and his illusions as a child of privilege are shattered.

Now he finds himself consigned to the Milne Home for Colored Boys, where he is taunted for his grandiose name and his scrabbling walk. His first defense is silence: He’ll speak to no one. But that isn’t enough. Shelton needs to be free. So at age 13 he runs as fast and as far as his twisted legs can carry him.

He travels no more than the hundred yards it takes to reach a bus-stop bench. Waiting there is a stranger named Minou Parrain, whose life is built of secrets. The most obvious of them is that he isn’t the blind man tourists think he is when he draws their pictures in Jackson Square. Minou’s mother was the housekeeper for the white man who bought Shelton, and she has been watching the boy ever since he landed in the Milne Home. “Those white folks had no business raising you,” Minou says. And there you have Shelton’s introduction to the complexities of race.

But race doesn’t dominate his story. Instead, it provides the texture as Shelton searches for a mother, a father, a home to call his own. And crippled or not, he drags the reluctant Minou along with him, learning about love and pain and art as he goes. When his search has ended and he is an old man, Shelton can still feel Minou’s presence. That is his gift of grace, just as this novel is John Gregory Brown’s gift of grace to us.