Despite all appearances to the contrary, Judson Mitchum’s newest novel, “Sabbath Creek,” is anything but another “baseball novel.”

Set in a fictional south Georgia town, the novel follows its young protagonist — a fourteen-year-old boy named Lewis Pope — as he and his mother find themselves stranded without a car at the Sabbath Creek Motor Lodge.

Here, Mitchum’s use of voice and dialogue betrays a certain degree of subtle humor as Lewis and his mother initially encounter the motel’s proprietor, a ninety-three-year-old black man named Truman Stroud.

A warm friendship soon ensues between Stroud and the boy when the old man reveals that he once played baseball for the “Sabbath Creek Stars,” a fictional baseball team from the Negro Leagues.

The book is a “baseball novel” only insofar as this relationship is contingent upon their mutual love of the sport, often illustrated through Stroud’s numerous stories and references to the late, great pitcher, Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

It quickly becomes evident, however, that Mitchum includes these anecdotes in order to serve the much more pointed purpose of providing what the book jacket calls “a nuanced look at race relations in the South, even while transcending that theme.”

Although the novel’s plot may seem conventional and downright overused when one reads about it in a synopsis, Mitchum succeeds in this claim of “transcendence.”

Mitchum’s characters are vividly rendered and full of idiosyncrasies — it is soon clear that Stroud’s old age and dialect, for instance, conceal both a sharp wit and keen intellect. He takes great pleasure in playing mind games with just about everybody he encounters — especially his bookish niece, Miss Josephine Young, with whom he often uses a sort of “Steppin’ Fetchit” dialect in order to irritate her.

“Sabbath Creek,” then, is neither the “baseball novel” nor “coming-of-age” story that it appears to be.

Instead, through his elegant and muscular prose, Mitchum offers us a panoramic microcosm of contemporary Southern life.

For those interested, Mitchum will be reading from his novel at the Crawford Long Museum in Jefferson this Saturday at 7 p.m., as a part of this weekend’s Oconee River LitFest.