HAMILL'S `AUGUST' DELVES INTO INQUISITIVE TEEN'S MIND.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Pete Hamill's new novel, ``Snow in August,'' begins in the last week of 1946 in a tenement house on ``the western slopes of the borough of Brooklyn.'' On a cold and blizzardy morning, 11-year-old Michael Devlin gets out of bed early, with his head full of fantasies of Captain Marvel and the power of the word ``shazam,'' and makes his way through snowy streets to serve as altar boy at Saturday Mass.

This is, of course, familiar fictional territory for Hamill, who is editor in chief of the New York Daily News and the author of seven previous novels, two volumes of short stories, two collections of his journalism and the best-selling memoir ``A Drinking Life.'' As he acknowledges at the end of ``Snow in August,'' his novel is ``a mixture of memory and invention.''

On his way to Mass, Michael is distracted from this world. As he passes a synagogue, a bearded man dressed in black hails him from a doorway and begs him to step inside. Afraid that he will be heaved into an oven or bricked up behind a wall, Michael nervously complies. The man, who turns out to be the synagogue's rabbi, asks Michael to turn on a light. He explains that on Shabbos it is not permitted to do such labor. Michael flicks the light switch, is rewarded with a nickel and goes on his way.

But he is intrigued by the experience. A thoughtful and sensitive boy whose father was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, Michael is trying to figure out the world on his own. Among his many bafflements is the hostility toward Jews in his neighborhood, a confusion that is sharpened when later the same Saturday he witnesses the near-fatal beating of a Jewish candy store owner by Frankie McCarthy, a local hooligan.

Like the People of the Book, Michael is fascinated with literature and learning. So he finds an excuse to return to the synagogue, falls into conversation with the rabbi and arrives at an agreement with him. Recently arrived in America from Czechoslovakia by way of the Dominican Republic, the rabbi - Judah Hirsch is his name - wants to improve his English and learn more about American culture.

He will teach Michael Yiddish and tell him about the culture of his native Prague. In exchange Michael will be his ``Shabbos goy,'' help him improve his English and in particular explain the game of baseball, which Rabbi Hirsch sees ``as his key to understanding America.'' Michael is happy to go along, particularly since it is an exciting time for Brooklyn fans, what with Jackie Robinson about to be promoted to the Dodgers.

Although conventional in form, ``Snow in August'' takes many risks, often approaching the brinks of sentimentality and cuteness without ever going over. As Rabbi Hirsch describes Prague's past, Michael envisions the spirits of the dead rising Chagall-like from a dug-up Jewish cemetery.

``Michael saw them now, hundreds of them, floating in the air, cartwheeling, swooping, men searching for women, and children searching for parents, high above the spires of St. Vitus, mixed in with Finn MacCool's lost followers, the fianna, all of them careening like birds, like a lost flock of robins.''

In exchange, Michael answers the rabbi's questions about the baseball announcer Red Barber.

`` `There's a bird in America that looks like a cat?' the rabbi asked.

`` `I don't know,' Michael said.

`` `So why does Red Barber say the Dodgers, they are in the catbird seat?'

`` `He says it all the time, like he says rhubarb.'

``The rabbi was flicking through his dictionary.

`` `Rhubarb? That's like a fruit I see in Roulston's grocery store.'

`` `Red Barber uses it to describe, like, well, a big fight. You know, if a batter gets hit by a pitch and he charges the mound? Or when Leo Durocher comes out to holler at the umpires. That's a rhubarb. And he says `We're sitting in the catbird seat' when he means the Dodgers are in good shape. They have the upper hand. They're sitting pretty. Know what I mean?'

`` `No.' ''

What keeps Hamill's plot boiling is the threat to Michael from Frankie McCarthy and his gang, who are afraid that Michael will tell what he knows about Frankie's beating of the candy-store owner. Michael is determined not to be marked a ``squealer,'' even though Rabbi Hirsch assures him, ``You keep quiet about some crime, it's just as bad as the crime.''

Still, because Frankie is found out, Michael is treated as if he had informed, losing his best friends and getting beaten up by Frankie's gang. In the end, he is pushed to wreak revenge on his tormentors, and Hamill permits him to act out a juvenile fantasy tantamount to achieving the power of Captain Marvel by speaking the magic word shazam.

At first you hesitate to go along with this fabrication, which is as far removed from plausibility as the snow in August of the novel's title. But then you end up giving in to it. After all, when you're 11 years old and surrounded by huge enemies, you sometimes have to give reality a hard twist to put yourself in the catbird seat.

Title: ``Snow in August''

Author: Pete Hamill

Data: 327 pages, Little, Brown & Co.; $23.95

Our rating: four stars

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PHOTO New York Daily News editor Pete Hamill has written eight novels, two volumes of short stories, two nonfiction collections and a memoir.