Hound Dog

By JAY COCKS

TENDER by Mark Childress

Harmony; 566 pages; $19.95

Pick an Elvis, any Elvis at all. There's the mythic bad boy mimed, most recently, by Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart. There is the great white whale with the red neck harpooned by Albert Goldman in his notorious unauthorized biography. Or there is the sweet prince of dreams, who provides the sound track for the heroine's housework in Alice Hoffman's recent Seventh Heaven.

At least all those folks called him by his name. For Mark Childress, Elvis is Leroy Kirby. The name is a down-home rendering of the French for Presley's nickname, "the King," but that's about the extent of the trouble taken to adjust the facts for fictional purposes. Tender is meant to be a biographical novel, but it reads more like an overextended vamp on a folk hero.

Kirby has all the Elvis baggage: a doting mom, a ne'er-do-well dad, a hardscrabble life in Tupelo, Miss., and a heart full of . . . well, fury. Leroy's mad about being poor, mad about his daddy, mad about the kids who laugh at him. He sets out to sing out and show the world. You know the rest. Childress does bring a little something new to the party, though. He has a good ear and a sympathetic eye for poor white life, Southern variety, and a sense of humor about Leroy's raffish relatives. The Kirbys are sort of Saturday-evening Snopeses, and if Tender can't penetrate the magic of its inspiration, it does a fair job of getting at the roots.