OUT AT HOME by Gary Pomeranz (Houghton...

OUT AT HOME by Gary Pomeranz (Houghton Mifflin: $14.95). Arnie Barzov is barely fazed when he gets kicked out of the University of Illinois for betting on basketball games. His mother’s upset, of course, but he’s been having problems with her anyway. Meanwhile, he’s making good money betting on baseball games and the horses, and he gets to spend his days at Wrigley Field watching the underdog Cubs blossom into pennant contenders. But strange things start happening on the field: The Cubs go into an unexplainable nose dive. And even stranger things happen in Barzov’s personal life. A chance meeting with a stranger leads Arnie through a mysterious--and sometimes threatening--series of encounters with mobsters, a nightclub singer, a seductive woman and even Cub players. What gives? Is it possible that all this is tied together in this first novel, set in the mid-’50s? They sure are, but the tortured string of characters and teasing plot wrinkles suggest more than Gary Pomeranz delivers. “Out at Home” is a pleasant, agreeable, youthful fantasy about searching for something or someone to believe in, but it suffers from too familiar and lightweight a tone.