The Long, Hot Summer New Orleans: "Necropolis of the South." by LEONARD GILL Yellow Jack By Josh Russell, Norton, 250 pp., $23.95 his will sound inconceivable to some, but Josh Russell's Yellow Jack is a first novel by a Southern novelist that is not a shoot-'em-up; a rosy-eyed pastoral; a semi-autobiographical transparency; a condemnation of the Old South; a condemnation of the New South; a satirical take on Bible-thumpers; a gothic gallery of neurotics; a race tract ... you guess the rest. Even so, Yellow Jack comes as a double-shocker: one, because its young author is already well ahead of the pack in his command of narrative; and two, because Russell is working from the ground up, the ground being that rare thing these days in a work of fiction -- the imagination. Imagine, then, this: New Orleans, the season summer, mid-19th century. "Yellow Jack," "Mister Jack," a.k.a. Yellow Fever is annually robbing the town of its population of some 100,000. In 1845 alone, the city's citizenry is reduced by a third. Those who can afford to have fled; those who can't afford to are burying the dead before they too are buried, victims of ... what? "Vapors"? Something in the water? Insects? Flora? A "curse some African spun"? Nightly cannon fire can't clear the air. Nor can the smoke of burning tar. Enter onto this scene Claude Marchand, former assistant to L.J.M. Daguerre in Paris. As an apprentice, it was Marchand who accidentally discovers the chemical key to capturing the objects viewed inside Daguerre's camera obscura. After a heated exchange with Daguerre, Marchand destroys the contents of his master's studio, makes off with Daguerre's equipment and chemicals, escapes France for good, and heads for that "shrunken Paris," New Orleans. Here he hopes to introduce his new-fangled art and set up shop. At this point, enter also Millicent, Marchand's octoroon mistress, and Vivien, daughter of a prominent sugar baron, who, by age 10, is already a creature sexually charged and full-focus before Marchand's lens. Marchand's "invention" is an immediate sensation with a public seeking portraits, but it's also a magnet for those, their dead in tow, seeking "memorials." The "tawdry, sacrilegeous" business of recording the latter Marchand the artist resists until poverty makes resistance impossible. But factor in his taste for cognac, opium, and hashish, a violent streak, and the occupational hazard of inhaled mercury fumes, and Marchand's mental state begins a course as fluctuating as a fever chart. Yellow Jack isn't his undoing, age 25, a suicide. An unfine madness is. The historical background to Yellow Jack, fascinating in and of itself, is one thing, but Josh Russell has fashioned a foreground of three interlocking narratives: first-person singular in the case of Marchand's matter-of-fact presentation of events; first-person singular in the case of Millicent's impressionistic diary entries; and an unexpected third-person in the case of an art historian's technical and formal analysis of Marchand's work. What we read, briefly in or out of chronological order, ranges from straightforward exposition, to oblique side references, to postponements in our understanding, to prefigurings of future action. Sounds confusing. In Russell's hands, it is not -- three dimensions, multi-angled, to augment the two dimensions of Marchand's art. "Tilt it one way and you see the past," Millicent observes, one of Marchand's so-called soliotypes in hand, "tilt it another and you see the present." By the "past" she means the image, be it of the living or the dead; by the "present" she means the mirror the soliotype briefly turns into if the angle and the light are right. Yellow Jack is full of such observations, and those observations make plausible, psychological sense coming from the characters who make them. Thus, throughout the novel, we repeatedly come across images reflected, mirrored, and optically layered, windows that give onto a scene one moment, obliterated by the sun's glare the next, opera glasses that stretch or diminish physical distance, the photographer as recorder of reality, the photographer as fraud. Is a stationary figure the more truthful because it is captured the more cleanly and clearly? Or is the blurred image of a figure in motion a closer record of reality? Marchand argues the former, a friend of Marchand's argues the latter, and 150 years of photography have yet to give us a conclusive answer. N.B.: Beware Yellow Jack's jacket copy, which would have you believe that this is "a ribald, picaresque trip ... saturated with sex, drugs, death, and corruption" -- an unbalanced description if there ever was one and grossly misrepresentative. If sex, drugs, death, and corruption you must have this summer, consult your nearest or dearest. Josh Russell has more on his mind in this book and more to his credit.