All in the Family

By Martha Duffy

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK by JAMES BALDWIN 197 pages. Dial. $6.95.

This novel might be classified as a deadline drama. It tells of a large Harlem clan's desperate efforts to get a young man out of jail--he is awaiting trial for a rape he did not commit--before his wife has a baby.

As a novel it is not a success, being too sentimental and predictable by half. But it has the makings of a splendid opera. Certainly the peculiarly hectic, yet static complications are all there. When boy (Fonny Hunt) meets girl (Tish Rivers) they fight, then fall in love and finally express their greatest raptures through a glass partition in the Tombs, where Fonny is incarcerated. There is also a good part for an alto as Tish's older sister, who goes from a settlement-house job to working for an actress in order to steal part of Penny's bail mon ey from the lady. Several other roles are worth about one fat aria, among them that of Penny's father, who kills himself when caught ripping off his garment-district employer.

Beale Street is not opera but a form of social realism. It is hard to speculate how a writer of Baldwin's quality succumbed to such timeless bathos. It is even more difficult to accept that a man capable of writing the dense, seductive prose of Giovanni's Room could turn out a slack bromide like "Trouble means you're alone."

Possibly Baldwin, who now lives in France, took to long fiction for the first time in six years out of disgust with the slag heaps of sociology about blacks. Such studies often go on about the in stability of the black family; the Rivers are both strong and united.

The heart of the problem may be that Baldwin has tried to tell his story through 19-year-old Tish. She proclaims the nobility of her family, Penny's sexual mastery, her hatred of whites. But it is not a real daughter or lover or mil itant who is talking. Instead it is a generalized, idealized girl -- one that the author (to his credit) would like to protect, but never succeeds in confronting. It is important that when Tish's baby is born ("My time had come," she intones), the child's sex is not even mentioned. It is just the future arriving once again. Can the past be far behind?

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