The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

Last year, as part of the coverage of President Clinton's race initiative, I traveled to Hot Springs, Ark, to tape a story for "NBC Nightly News" on race relations in the president's hometown. I ended up disappointed in the story that aired. The only strong moment came when I asked a white woman how she would feel if her daughter came home with a black man to marry She paused, sighed, and said evenly to the camera: "I'd pray." Beyond that, the story was far too superficial, even for television. The same has been true of various articles about race that I've written for Newsweek over the years. And I'm not alone. Journalists feel frustrated by the complexity of certain subjects, but especially this one. The deepest stories -- the ones in the marrow of the nation -- are always the hardest to convey.

But Alex Kotlowitz, author of the highly acclaimed There Are No Children Here, a wrenching account of the lives of two African-American boys in a Chicago housing project, is game to try again. This time his subject is the mysterious death of Eric McGinniss, a 16-year old black kid who was last seen alive in a white neighborhood and ended up drowning in a river between the towns of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, Michigan.

By the standards of modern-day non-fiction thrillers, the new book is a failure. It doesn't give away too much to say that the resolution, the "payoff," leaves more than a little to be desired. In recent years, a number of similar books have been written as powerful narratives. The author usually novelizes the story as best he can with vivid characters and a tidy, satisfying ending. If certain players won't be interviewed, he writes around them. If facts are inconvenient, as they were in John Berendt's In the Garden of Good and Evil, he sometimes simply changes them.

Kotlowitz takes the more honest tack. Every writerly doubt, every failed lead, every source who stiffs him is grist for his layered tale of racial myth and countermyth. Although the book is disjointed and padded in parts, Kotlowitz succeeds in making his frustration in finding the truth about Eric's death serve as a metaphor for our larger frustrations about race. It's a dark photo montage of the American dilemma, vintage 1990s. The serious student of racial problems won!t learn much, but The Other Side of the River is an evocative reminder of the essential messiness and emotional confusion of life in this country. Every crime, every conversation, ends up being just...