APPROXIMATELY HEAVEN

Rambling and low-key, this debut novel takes its bumbling, chronically bewildered narrator from a life as an electrician-cum-handyman in a small Tennessee town to a series of adventures on the open road. When Don's wife of seven years threatens to leave him, he decides the only way to make her stay is to leave himself—he's sure she won't abandon their dog and cat. Luckily, his friend Dove, a fellow working stiff, is about to set off for Mississippi to deliver a load of furniture to his newly married daughter, Rhonda. On their junket, Dove and Don meet an assortment of semitrustworthy women, gamble in Biloxi and drink a lot of cheap beer, ending many evenings in a drunken stupor. Various revelations are made along the way—the whereabouts of a stash of $38,000; Dove's plans for a gun he has brought along—but Whorton makes little effort to build ordinary suspense. As a neo-picaresque road novel, the book relies on the charms of Don's befuddled, countrified voice. The curious flatness of his narration jives well with his numbed state, but deflects the reader with its string of uninflected observations. Whorton knows his poverty-stricken settings well, bringing us into them with believable understatement, but the territory he plumbs—the redneck underbelly of America, with its cheap diners, seedy motels and run-down businesses—has been examined more poignantly before. Even the surprise ending, in which Don destroys the symbolic prized possession of his former life, seems canned and provides little satisfaction. (July 15)