Sena Jeter Naslund's critically acclaimed novel Ahab's Wife tells an epic-size tale of the wife we never meet in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Inspired by a brief passage in Melville's book, the popular novel was named one of the best titles of 1999 by the New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly, among others.

Naslund's much-anticipated next novel, Four Spirits, tackles an equally ambitious topic as Naslund weaves her plot around the 1963 racist bombing of the Sixteenth Avenue Church in Birmingham, Ala., an event that resulted in the deaths of four young black girls.

Naslund grew up in Birmingham, and had promised herself that she would one day write about the atrocities and sheer courage of the Alabama civil rights struggle. In this story, she pulls together an impressively disparate array of characters. But somehow, despite Naslund's drive to unravel the horrific racism of her hometown 40 ago, Four Spirits misses its mark.

The novel opens in Helicon, Ala., as five- year-old Stella Silver is learning to fire a pistol into the woods. The weight of the gun unnerves her, but with her parents and two brothers encouraging her to fire into the trees, Stella pushes aside her fears and pulls back on the trigger. Later that evening as the family is headed home, a cyclone dips down and pushes the car over an embankment, killing all inside save Stella.

It is Stella, then, whom we follow from childhood to young romance to post-college employment, with all narrative attention pointed toward the Birmingham church bombing that arrives about one-third of the way through Naslund's lengthy novel.

Stella, of course, is haunted by her family's deaths, and those final harmless shots fired at nearby trees reverberate throughout the book as public tragedy strikes again and again - not just at the Sixteenth Avenue Church, but also among Naslund's motley gathering of characters.

Other key players in Four Spirits include Cat, a wheelchair-bound recent college graduate who, like Stella, is white but deeply impassioned by the civil rights movement; Christine, an angry young black teacher whose wariness of her white co-teachers is nearly palpable; Lionel Parrish, the black reverend who teaches night school to black high school dropouts; and Ryder, an ignorant, violently racist KKK member who gleefully terrorizes both the black community of Birmingham and his own abused wife, Lee.

The problem with Four Spirits is that, although the action is unquestionably fast-paced and nicely drawn together, the surprises are few and the characters often slide dangerously close to the very racial stereotypes that Naslund surely seeks to shatter.

Too often the novel's key players feel neatly trimmed. It is much too easy to typecast as stereotypes of the civil rights movement: Stella, the typical white woman whose passion for the movement is clouded by guilt; Christine, the black woman whose lifelong battles with racism have left her sharp-tongued and emotionally embattled; Lionel, the smooth-tongued black preacher with a caring wife and a house full of children, but a penchant for younger women trophies to escort proudly on his arm and so on.

Despite Four Spirits' inclusive array of voices - young, old, black, white, liberal, racist - readers won't emerge from the story with a new sense of the civil rights movement or of racism in 1960s Birmingham. Surprisingly little in Naslund's novel leads us past a casual interest in the upended lives of others to a place of civil outrage.

Naslund attempts something both admirable and necessary to the body of historical American literature: a look back at the 1960s civil rights movement that tries to pull together a variety of voices.

This time, though, good intentions have only led us to a mildly interesting tale rather than an illuminating life lesson.

Jennie A. Camp's reviews and short stories have appeared in "Prairie Schooner" "Colorado Review" and other publications. She lives in Platteville.