A Noble Throwback : RICOCHET RIVER <i> By Robin Cody</i> , <i> (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 288 pp.) </i>

Jesse Howl, the spiritual center of Robin Cody’s first novel, is lusty, sweetly naive and generally full of beans, much like the trickster Coyote of Indian mythology. “Coyote was basically a braggart and a joker,” explains Wade Curren, who is the book’s narrator and Jesse’s best friend, “but he had these powers and was trying to help.” Wade is also trying to help, aiding Jesse with a paper for his high school English class in the otherwise all-white town of Calamus, Ore.

Multiculturalism today is at least starting to be institutionalized, but at the end of the Eisenhower era, when “Ricochet River” takes place, Jesse’s tales of Indian cultural history are met with derision and distrust (only Wade and his family listen, raptly, to Jesse’s stories).

A member of the nearly defunct Klamath tribe, Jesse is dropped off in Calamus by his mother to finish his last year of high school there.

Wade first encounters Jesse on the athletic field, where he is awed by the grace and skill of the exotic stranger, “a skinny left-hander with this goofy grin.” Jesse goes to live with Wade’s “crusty old Fossil” of a grandfather--who may or may not be Jesse’s father; the two boys become fast friends.

So long as Jesse earns glory for the high school team, he is tolerated by the residents of the sports-mad town, who keep most of their ugly racist remarks to an undertone. But when he fails to show up for practice, or goes off on a toot instead of playing with his team, the town folks’ envy and fear are unleashed against him.

Wade’s narrative is interspersed with his observations on the life history of the Chinook salmon, the massive, seagoing fish that migrate inland once a year to spawn. For thousands of years the fish provided food and a livelihood for the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, until the white settlers came along and dammed the rivers for logging operations, upsetting the balance of nature. “The way it was set up --for as long as there were Indians on the river--the strongest of the salmon made it back upriver to spawn, yet the most skillful of the people caught the most fish. It was a dizzying kind of glimpse at a more perfect world.”

Wade’s grandfather compares the residents of Calamus to the stunted, landlocked salmon that live in the millpond: descendants of a powerful strain, but with all the fire and dignity bred out of them.

Jesse is emblematic of an earlier, nobler breed that seems to have no place among the inauthenticity and the watered-down heroics of the modern world. Despite Wade’s panic-stricken efforts to save him, Jesse is undone by the small-minded people of Calamus.

Although in all ways decent and considerate, a source of pride to his family, a good student, a star athlete and a true friend, Wade is less than brilliant as a narrator (such observations as “The night seemed full, waiting to happen,” made this reader groan out loud).

Yet the book has some stunning moments, such as the squishy sex scene between Wade and his girlfriend Lorna in the wet underbrush within sight of spawning salmon.

Where the author has fully succeeded is in creating a sense of place and a truly wonderful character in the person of Jesse Howl. I hope that in his next book Robin Cody allows himself even greater narrative scope for his considerable imaginative powers.