Invisible Men

By John Skow

CIVIL WARS by Rosellen Brown Knopf; 400 pages; $16.95

Teddy Carll, an idealistic white Mississippian, was a hero of the civil rights marches in the '60s who nearly died when his car was run off the road by enraged rednecks. Did die, clinically, the legend has it; doctors brought him back from beyond the edge. Should have died, probably; his life since then has been a washout. This is not because of his injuries, which left a facial scar but did no other permanent damage. It is because, as Novelist Rosellen Brown sketches him, he is temperamentally unsuited to be anything but the star of a protest movement.

Most civil rights pioneers long ago accepted an outcome somewhere between victory and defeat and went home. Home for Carll is an ideological stance; he, his wife and two children live, by his choice, as virtually the only whites in a black development in Jackson. He holds down a plodding job as a traveling salesman of schoolbooks that cosmeticize the '60s and neglect to mention evolution.

Jessie, a New York Jew who fought through the civil rights wars with her husband, wants to sell. Not sell out, just abandon a pose of high-minded poverty that is not accomplishing anything, and move to a decent house in an integrated neighborhood. Carll won't budge. Then his sister and brother-in-law, affluent segregationists from Birmingham, are killed in a car accident. Their two children, mannerly young racists, move in with Carll and Jessie. More space is needed, and Carll acquiesces sulkily when Jessie finds a larger house in a middle-class neighborhood.

With this change of scene, the novel shifts its focus from Carll's aimlessness to Jessie's desperate efforts to stabilize her in-laws' children at some workable level of sanity and racial tolerance. She succeeds, it appears, with one, a hardy eight-year-old boy, and is on the point of failing with the other, a neurasthenic 13-year-old girl who wobbles in adolescent self-pity to ward the Ku Klux Klan, suicide or both.

This struggle is worth all of the tough, vigorous, passionate sentences that the author throws into the battle. Unfortunately, Jessie comes to overshadow her husband, who would make a fine dramatic contrast to her if he were allowed to spend some time onstage. But Brown sends him packing off for days at a time on vague errands, while Jessie stays at home and copes. When Carll does involve himself in a misbegotten civil rights march, the action takes place beyond the reader's view. When he spends a few hours in the new house that he holds in such contempt, his behavior is noted through his wife's eyes, and Jessie's thoughts are on Jessie.

Late in the book a parallel is developed between Carll and Jessie's father, an oldtime Communist who once left his family for two years on party orders and who now spends his time grumbling about his wife's bourgeois taste in furniture. The coincidence of husband and father immobilized by idealism gone stale is interesting. But in the end it hurts a novel in which there is no adult male with substance enough to cast a shadow. This is true even for minor characters; an interracial couple friendly to Jessie and Carll consists of a black wife who is a shrewd, forceful lawyer and a white husband so nearly nondescript as to be invisible.

Well, why not? There is a lot of male invisibility going around these days. How should an out-of-date hero spend his time? Must idealism always be corrosive, as well as ennobling? Jessie does not know, but she is busy with the children. Can Carll see any glimmers of hope or despair? The reader never finds out much about this man, because Brown does not take the trouble to give him a fully drawn character. As things are, what we are given by this gifted author, who wrote the much praised 1978 novel Tender Mercies, is chiefly a very long list of Jessie's considerable troubles. These include a large flood, which serves the useful purpose of bringing the story to a close. You may be sure that Jessie handles it womanfully, and that Carll shows up when it is over, wringing his dry hands.

--By John Skow