A Vivid Picture of Poverty and Racism : THE VIEW FROM HERE by Brian Keith Jackson; Pocket Books $22, 229 pages

Brian Keith Jackson sets his first novel, about African American life in segregated Mississippi around 1950, outside the town of “Eudora” in “Welty County,” but the author he brings to mind most readily is Alice Walker.

Just as Walker’s “The Color Purple” is the story of Celie’s emancipation from the stunted self-image men have raped and beaten into her, so Jackson’s heroine, Anna Anderson Thomas, learns to stand up to the overbearing man in her life--her husband, J. T.

J. T. is a lumber mill worker with hands “like iron” whose brooding silences maintain his power in the home--a power he conspicuously lacks at the mill, where after 20 years he is laid off in favor of younger, more literate workers such as his oldest son, Junior.

When Anna, who has given J. T. five sons, gets pregnant again, he decrees: ‘You cain’t keep it. . . . My back is breakin’ awready and I don’t need another screamin’ chile runnin’ round keepin’ up racket.” Instead, he says, the baby will belong to his childless older sister, Clariece, a minister’s wife who helped raise him when he was a boy.

For Anna, “he had spoken, and nothing more need be said.”

Her acquiescence, unlike Celie’s, isn’t based strictly on fear. She loves J. T. and believes in his essential goodness, though we can see precious few signs of it. “She knew him better than he knew himself, and sometimes in that came the hurt, the understanding.”

Love and subordination in marriage are the issues that separated Anna from her best friend, Ida Mae Ramsey. Like Shug in “The Color Purple,” the high-spirited Ida Mae insists on independence. She has gone north and left no forwarding address, though she writes once in a while. Anna, as the time to have the baby--and give it up--draws near, records her anxious thoughts in unsent letters to Ida Mae.

These letters are one of the three forms of narration Jackson uses. In flashbacks from Anna’s point of view, we learn of the benign influence of her mother, Gram Anderson; her half-shocked admiration of Ida Mae’s daring; and her courtship at church socials by a shy and mannerly J. T.

Nothing in this suggests the oppression that beat Celie down. What has happened to Anna, then, in the intervening years--and what has made J. T. so hard-headed and bitter, unwilling to tolerate any challenge to his authority?

White people, and the social injustices of the time, are less evident here than in Walker’s book. Jackson is dealing here with racism’s less direct consequences--with how black people treated one another. And our guide in these matters is none other than the unborn baby, whom Anna believes to be a girl and names L’il Lisa.

We learn too late--at the very end of the novel--that Lisa has collected her mother’s letters to Ida Mae and, possibly, reconstructed in her imagination the events she describes.

Before that, though, we are led to believe, in the sections Lisa narrates, that she has precocious understanding, ears like a hidden CIA microphone and X-ray vision through the walls of the womb.

“The View From Here” turns out to be the view from there.

The absurdity of this device--in contrast to the controlled evolution of Walker’s style in “The Color Purple” as Celie gains in consciousness--can’t help but damage Jackson’s novel, despite its vivid picture of family life under the stresses of poverty.

For a young man (29), Jackson offers us a compassionate look at J. T., who proves to be, as Anna suspects, a frightened child in a man’s body. And his portraits of Anna, her mother and Ida Mae bear out his stated intention to say “thank you” to the women in his background.