Cursed and Blessed With Memory : IN TROUBLED WATERS, <i> By Beverly Coyle (Ticknor & Fields: $19.95; 324 pp.)</i>

Racial integration should be working, ought to be working, a 70-year-old Florida woman thinks toward the end of this complex and fascinating novel: “More votes, better schools, the (African-American) boy’s changing the curriculum and living next door and taking office. Some of it had happened, but not with any social interchange. Almost none. Maybe none at all. It seemed incredible. On paper everything was supposed to be working.”

Several years ago Beverly Coyle put together a series of short stories about a white Protestant ministry in Central Florida--a ministry and a set of beliefs that seemed to be decaying and dying faster even than the orange groves that once blanketed the swampy Florida land, and yet lived on, in strange, ineffable ways. In “The Kneeling Bus,” the title story, all objects, even buses for the handicapped in Godless New York, seemed to recognize and bow to a benign higher power. At that time, Beverly Coyle wrote that she was interested in the process of loss, the description and evocation of the things in life that have left us irrevocably; the past that we may remember but that we will never see again.

Coyle’s first novel, “In Troubled Waters,” takes up this theme again. This time her subject matter is far more complex, her method far more focused. We live in the present, but the past is always with us. How do we learn from that past, bring order to it, when so much of it is disgraceful, unbearable? Coyle uses four generations of a Central Florida family to examine this process. She places her family square on the shore of Mirror Lake. To look out of the family’s window is to see the past. There’s no way we can get away from it. The only alternative to memory is to forget entirely.

And here the novelist tries something very daring, and succeeds, in fictional terms, beyond the reader’s wildest dreams. What if you created a main character with Alzheimer’s disease? The past wouldn’t bother him at all. Each moment would be minted entirely shining, entirely new.

And, no, it isn’t the novel’s oldest character who carries this affliction. Tom Glover, age 91, is the oldest character here, the smartest and the meanest. His family, a cantankerous flock of southern white pioneers, has lived on Mirror Lake since anyone can remember. Tom is as mean as a snake, and that meanness comes from inside and out. His parents were tough and mean, so that’s in his genes, and the past he grew up in was totally relentless in its emotional toll. Tom has been mean all these years the way a fighter finds his place in a boxing ring. His dukes are always up.

He’s disgusted, now, that his well-meaning daughter, Lois Barnes, has had to come “home” to live with him, along with her husband, Paul. Paul is “in the middle of the middle stage” of Alzheimer’s. Paul forgets where he is and who he is; forgets who his wife is. Every once in a while he expresses a strong desire to go home. His wife obligingly packs up his suitcases, drives him around town for a while and then does bring him back home.

Everyone in this novel is homesick, suffering from isolation and dislocation. They cope with it in different ways. Old Tom Glover is mean, Lois is endlessly obliging, and Paul has nothing but a set of perfect good manners with which to meet this world. (Their daughter, Carol, unmarried, has purchased her son Pety from a sperm bank; another way to totally blow off the past--the “sins of the father”--is to simply not have a past at all.)

The past in the Glover family, and on Mirror Lake, has to do with injustice against African-Americans. How could it not, given the imperatives of geography and history? Old Tom Glover remembers a past before “sin” was committed--a time when he and a black kid named Lucky Apple played and swam in the lake together almost as brothers. But this “Eden” at the very outer rim of Tom’s memory is sullied from the beginning. Lucky was “like” a brother, but not a real brother. That didn’t keep Tom’s own mother from preferring Lucky, loving him the best.

Then, in a moment that returns and returns again in Tom’s very good memory, the reality of the social situation is unveiled. The fictions about brotherhood fall away. At an idyllic southern picnic on a Sunday afternoon, a rabid dog appears, terrifies the gathering, then slinks away under the house. Without thought, instinctively, young Tom’s father speaks to Lucky Apple: “Get on under there, boy.”

As old, mean Tom remembers it now, “Lucky was about to enter some truer domain. Glover, as young as he was, knew that all blacks lived there after a certain age.” Lucky, knowing himself to be totally expendable, less than human, gets the dog out from under the basement and then promptly runs away. He stays around town though, his lazy scorn covering a deep and terrible emotional wound. “I loved you,” is his silent message, “and you literally threw me to the dogs. Why? How could you have done it?”

A few years later, Lucky and about a dozen other blacks are burned alive by a gang of lowlife white trash in a nearby town. But before he dies, Lucky returns “home,” home to the Glover household to spend his last days. All this, and other tragedies, wreck the childhood and the adulthood of Tom Glover. He becomes a cruel man, loses the love of his wife and earns the fear of his daughter.

Now, because he is so old and mean, he devises a scheme: He hires a couple of young boys, one black and one white (mirror images of himself and Lucky) to take his mentally crippled but perfectly mannered son-in-law, Paul, fishing everyday. Of the two, the black boy is smarter, more lovable, more stubborn. History, the author reminds us, doesn’t exactly repeat itself, but it “rhymes.” Patterns turn up again and again.

But this young black kid’s mother is working on her doctoral dissertation, collecting facts about the terrible mass burning from years before, and other facts that white people want desperately to forget--that mean Tom Glover, for instance, tied his own daughter to a tree as punishment for playing with a little black girl.

Right now, at this moment, this book is perfect for Los Angeles, perfect for America. If only the race question would sort itself out! If only we could all find a way to make ourselves at home here! But it’s way too hard. Every good deed tends to carry with it an undertone of patronization; every bad deed carries a thread of reproach, of unrequited love. We remember different versions of the same history, and we can’t--because we’re human, we are cursed and blessed with memory--forget everything, and approach each moment new.

As in “The Kneeling Bus,” the answer, if there is one, is wryly Christian. Only love, or failing that, affection, will get us through. But who knows whether we’re going to get through at all? We’ve done so many mean things in the past, and the future is a crap shoot--absolutely up for grabs.