From McFarland, a long hot summer in 1959 Virginia

Prince Edward

By Dennis McFarland

Holt, 354 pp., $25

In 14 BC, the Roman poet Horace wrote that a storyteller should proceed ''by charming his reader and at the same time instructing him." It's still true that a well-constructed narrative teaches us lessons about the world and our place in it. But today, just as in Horace's time, good stories entertain us first, educating only as a byproduct. The didactic book is a dead book.

That in mind, from the well of Southern Gothic fiction comes Dennis McFarland's fifth novel, ''Prince Edward," a tale of school desegregation and family discord set in rural Virginia, circa 1959. Having grown up on an Alabama chicken farm during the civil rights era, McFarland mingles the quotidian detail of his own childhood with impressive dollops of research to create the fictional Rome family, white egg farmers and bit players in this race-relations drama. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the dysfunctional Romes are drawn into local efforts to block court-ordered integration.

In Prince Edward County, the solution to the problem created by Brown v. Board of Education was to close the public schools and create a private, whites-only alternative. ''Daddy, hunched over his plate in a clean white undershirt, pointed out that there wasn't no sense in giving books" to black people ''since all they cared about was drinking and dancing, shooting pool and carrying on."

McFarland tells his story through 10-year-old Benjamin Rome, an observant, intelligent lad but, due to his age and circumstance, the least powerful of the clan. Ben and his ''little colored friend" Burghardt Mays, who lives in a nearby tenant shack, while away the summer of '59 collecting eggs, swimming in the creek, and worrying about the fate of their beloved schools. Haunting their idyll is patriarch Daddy Cary, Ben's grandfather, an unapologetic racist, prone to scaring people with firecrackers and bullying the lesser members of his family. Daddy Cary takes an unhealthy interest in the two boys, adding to the sense of darkness gathering on their horizon.

McFarland works in traditional narrative, which is a relief and a boon to those of us still invigorated by an old-fashioned yarn. Devoid of weak metaphors, extraneous adverbs, and the fey posing of much contemporary fiction, his style is easy and smooth, the descriptions etched in simple language and all the more powerful because of it: ''Bright lines of sunlight squeezed through the cracks in the bridge overhead, fell on the dark water, wigwagged on Daddy Cary's genie-like cigar smoke, and even segmented Daddy Cary himself in two places; one gash of light cut straight across his forehead, another across his knees."

Too often, however, McFarland turns to the most shopworn conventions of Gothic fiction to bolster his ample storytelling skills. Nearly all the white folks, with the exception of Ben and his pregnant sister, Lainie, are ignorant and racist; the black characters, especially Burghardt's wise old prophesying Granny Mays and Julius, his Stepin Fetchit of a dad, are straight out of central casting. The same ground has been well tracked by other writers and their stories, from William Faulkner's ''Barn Burning" and Flannery O'Connor's ''Good Country People" to Harry Crews's ''A Childhood: The Biography of a Place." Ultimately, ''Prince Edward" cribs from this tradition rather than adds to it.

Of course, McFarland is faced with the unhappy task of making racist cretins seem interesting -- or, at least, worthy of the reader's attention. O'Connor circumvented this by granting her most vile characters what she called a ''moment of grace," a single redeeming quality that simultaneously managed to heighten their evil nature while establishing their humanity. Horace himself noted that the secret of good writing is sound judgment, and McFarland makes an unfortunate choice when he decides that Daddy Cary should be both a racist and pedophile. Such a characterization overstates, distorts, and detracts from the principal thrust of the novel -- that those who resisted school desegregation were wrong, and will be judged so by history.

McFarland excels when he lets the natural contour of his story rule over plot machinations. At a party celebrating Daddy Cary's 65th birthday, one of young Ben's schoolmates, an underfed urchin named Paisley Chatham who is known for his singing voice, is coerced into entertaining. After gorging himself on fried chicken and potato salad, Paisley stands in a cleared space on the lawn and renders an old sea chantey. McFarland captures the magic of the boy's performance by depicting the reaction of his audience; the crowd of drunks, bigots and ne'er-do-wells are transfixed by this siren song, as if all that's good and decent is singing to those who've forgotten what music is. ''It was perfect, effortless singing, youthful and uncontemplated, and when Paisley was done wringing out the last Missouri, the only sound in the world was the tap-tap of a moth beating its chalky brains against the porch light."

In passages like this, McFarland transcends the self-imposed limitations of his material, meeting Horace's prescription that the writer should ''blend in one the delightful and the useful."

Jay Atkinson is the author of ''Ice Time," ''Caveman Politics," and a forthcoming book, about his adventures as a Boston private investigator. He teaches writing at Salem State College.