The Suburbs of Heaven
"If I could get Pauline to see daylight, get my kids settled,  and pay off my debts, why, we could be living in the suburbs of heaven," Jim  Hutchins thinks in a uncharacteristically optimistic moment from Merle Drown's second novel. But he isn't getting anywhere near heaven anytime  soon--not even its suburbs, not even its commercial strip. Considering the many obstacles standing between Jim and heaven (the tax man after him, his wife  Pauline mired in grief over their drowned daughter, another daughter turning  tricks for booze money, one son in and out of jail and the other son thinking a  snake has hatched in his head), he might as well be writing postcards from the fiery pit. What's more, while Jimsuspectshis brother-in-law Emory Holler has murdered his sister, heknowshis wife Pauline has been dancing in her altogether for Emory. Finally, there's a panty thief terrorizing their rural New Hampshire town, and somehow, you just know he's going to make an appearance before the  novel's end.All things considered, Jim Hutchins is a kind of Down East Job, though  he wastes little time picking scabs or cursing God. Jim's a man of action,  not reflection, and so the book begins with a shotgun and ends with an  inferno, with comedy and tragedy battling it out in the pages between. What  keeps all this from turning into an episode of Jerry Springer is Drown's  black, biting wit and his prose, which like the characters themselves is both colorful and coiled tight as a spring. (The police stick to Tommy  Hutchins like "straw to a sweaty neck"; Jim gets mad but stays "sober as a cold chisel.") If the concluding reversal comes about a trifle suddenly,  well, there are greater crimes in this world--crimes that one of the Hutchins  clan is sure to commit if you just give them a chance.--Mary Park