THE FLAMINGO RISING.<i> By Larry Baker</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 310 pp., $24</i>

When was the last time you thought of a drive-in movie screen as Moby Dick? No need to answer. This flying leap of the imagination is taken by Larry Baker in “The Flamingo Rising,” a first novel that dares mix the Icarus, Oedipus and Earhart myths, risks a Romeo and Juliet update, plunders Dante, references the Bible, rewrites movie history and inside-outs the American past. Yet Baker’s book is far from pretentious; it’s one of the more endearingly adept debuts to come along in a while.

First novels traditionally tend to be a young writer’s art form, and usually neither enough art nor form applies. With the recent rush to memoir by the less-than-mature, however, fiction’s been left to lives more steeped in incident and experience and given to talents more developed to explore emotional terrain. Take Baker: After 40-odd years, his own life (too interesting to disregard--bumming-arounder, drive-in movie manager, bookseller, Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and now a second-term City Council member) never gets in the way of a novel that is as fully realized as it is inventive, humorous and heartaching.

If fortunes get made fast and big in America, providing sustenance to the creativity, sloth or tragedy of the next generation, then the tobacco fortune inherited by Hubert T. Lee, whose son, Abraham Isaac, narrates “The Flamingo Rising,” is put to some of the most flamboyantly obsessional uses yet. Disillusioned scion of the Southern aristocracy, Lee lands in 1950s Jacksonville, Fla., with his inordinately tall, sweet wife and their two children, Korean orphans he brings home from the war. Exerting a peculiar brand of carpetbagging on a culture even more southerly and defeated than his own and on a territory primed for his expressions of genteel madness and apocalyptic empire building, he is moved to erect a drive-in movie theater.

But not just any drive-in: The Flamingo is a 200-foot wide, 150-foot tall tower bolstered by “six ancient California redwoods” floated in through the Panama Canal and “replanted twenty feet deep in the Florida sand and dirt. . . .” Helping turn night into day is “the world’s largest neon marquee, a glaring pink flamingo whose head continually dipped and whose body rested on one leg while the other extended and retracted. Florida nights along A1A were more pink than black . . . a pink ‘worthy of a New Orleans whorehouse.’ ” One week, Hubert shows a childbirth documentary up on the big screen.

The Lee family, their staff and a ferocious “dachshund-terrier mongrel” named Frank live inside the drive-in. Hubert is a man possessed, especially by the need to tease and torture his neighbor, Turner West, whose adjacent funeral home he views as a blot on the sensual seaside landscape and an affront to his own lust for life. His desire to needle West only grows once he discovers West’s passion toward his wife and Abe’s love for West’s daughter. Her name, of course, is Grace.

“The Flamingo Rising” is Abraham’s story in sensibility and matters of his heart. From the moment his father reads fate into their twinned names--the tag on the orphanage crib says “Lee Sung Kyung”--Abe is destined to a peculiar, wondrous and startlingly sad coming-of-age. Profoundly cherished by erudite, eccentric parents, he and his beautiful sister, Louise, a future film star, are home-schooled until sixth grade, whereupon they exchange their innocent, insular, Flamingo-centric world for the treacherous universe of American adolescence. They turn 16 the summer of 1968, with the explosive intersecting of the personal, political and historical that implies. Fireworks ensue (not including Abe’s father going over the top every July 4). Baker is tremendously wise when it comes to exposing hubris as simultaneously hilarious and deadly.

Vietnam hovers and threatens to put Abe’s racial identity to a test; music is headed for Woodstock; college campuses seethe; civil rights issues hit home; and some randy, triumphant, female consciousness-raising takes place, even around the Flamingo, a towering bastion of testosterone. Abe, a hopeless romantic preoccupied with losing his virginity, gets help from a couple of tremendously appealing women who understand just how uncomfortable living with horniness and love-longing can be. Baker makes the romanticism real and funny; only the teenage sex stuff gets a little wearying and throws the novel off-balance.

His Flamingo stands--and disintegrates--as a wholly original symbol, a pop culture monument to American ambition, illusionism and giddily tasteless architecture. It’s a grandiose icon inhabited by a motley crew of vernacular archetypes: Mom, Pop, multi-culti kids, a wise old black man and a blond beach babe. The fact that they touch us, memorably, as people rather than as abstractions says a lot about Baker’s wide-open gifts.