The Root of All Evil : ORDINARY MONEY <i> by Louis B. Jones (Viking: $18.95; 345 pp.) </i>

In “Ordinary Money,” Louis B. Jones writes old-fashioned verities in arrestingly original fashion. To spell out just what these verities are would be self-defeating, since it would make “Ordinary Money” sound like a sermon, which it is not. It satirizes the futility with which money and pleasure are pursued in our culture, but it delivers the message through the delicately far-fetched things that befall two ordinary American families when 20 million dollars are mysteriously dumped upon one of them.

Wayne and Randy, who were high school buddies and are still friends, live in the brackish lower reaches of the American Dream, and in an unfashionable part of Marin County. Wayne is a house painter; a long-suffering, dependable man undependably employed. Randy is itchy and mercurial and holds a variety of nondescript jobs. Both would like to be rich and don’t expect to be.

Through an ad, Randy goes to work for Bim Auctor, small and finely built, who, as his name suggests, could have come from outer space but is actually a mad genius. One day, Auctor tells Randy to take charge of 10 crates containing 1 million 20-dollar bills and deposit them in safe-deposit boxes under his own name. Auctor, who cannot be contacted, will send him further instructions. Meanwhile, Randy is to spend what he needs as if the money were his own.

Auctor is never heard from again. Randy goes on a restless and unsatisfactory spending binge. The money seems imaginary; so do his new big house and red Ferrari. Eventually, a group of federal agents catches up with him and questions him, but then seem curiously hesitant about making an arrest.

This part of the plot--its major strand one might say, and an ingenious one--develops around the question of whether the money is real or counterfeit. Rigorous tests show no flaws. This does not mean it is real, though. Auctor seems to have developed a method of producing perfect forgeries. This is so alarming, so potentially destabilizing to the national and international economies, that it may be better for the government to pretend it is real and let Randy keep it.

There is a wicked dose of social satire in all this, along with some intriguing questions: How real is money anyway? How real is the pursuit of it; how real is what it buys? When Randy’s daughter, Cindy--we will come to her in a moment--receives an expensive motor scooter, it makes her sick to the stomach. Love is what she needs. The comic spectacle of federal agents, lawyers, mysterious academics and high-level officials arguing over what to do--while Randy goes on shopping joylessly--is more than comedy.

If a message, somewhere between funny spoof and sharp parable, is the organizing principle of “Ordinary Money,” the book is considerably more than that. Randy, though useful and funny, is fairly thin. But Jones, somewhat in the style of Stanley Elkin, knows how to make some remarkably rounded and touching characters flourish among his messages.

Money, success, liberation, self-gratification are the desiccating fevers in Jones’ America. Randy dries up; so does his awful divorced wife, Mary, a monster of fashionable selfishness with a fount of cliches about inner space, liberation and self-fulfillment.

Cindy, their daughter, is their sad and appealing victim. Nobody has time for her; she keeps a collection of suicide notes and ransom notes stuffed inside her Kermit doll; she takes them out sometimes and reads them. And when Randy briefly abducts her for a trip to England, she checks to see if her mother has carried out her threat to put out a Missing Child notice. When she discovers that she hasn’t bothered, she is heart-broken; and our hearts develop their own stress lines.

And we still have not reached Wayne, the book’s bitter, puzzled and beautifully drawn hero. He aches; he desperately wants money; he struggles against the knowledge that he will never make very much. Kim, his daughter, was born with a harelip and a missing nipple; the plastic surgery that has restored her wholeness has left him with colossal medical bills.

He is tempted to take some of Randy’s money. He keeps opening up the crate of bills Randy has left in his garage. Laid off as a house painter, he is suckered into working for a telemarketing operation that swindles those who work for it in hopes of making a fortune. Jones is fiendishly clever at describing the swindle and the supersalesman who cons Wayne into putting his wife’s savings--all they own--into it.

Wayne is a battleground. He is prey to the dream of success and the other fashionable lusts of the age. He dabbles at seduction with a bar pick-up; suddenly, they find themselves in her apartment having--to their mutual relief--nothing more than a little wine and a friendly chat. And finally Wayne pulls back, goes to work for himself as a house painter and accepts his wife’s pregnancy, which up to then had seemed like one more persecution. Ordinary money is worth far more than outer-space millions.

Wayne draws much of his strength from Laura, his wife. She is spunky, sexy and utterly independent of the illusions around her. She is also written with a shade too much of familiar wonderfulness. Kim, on the other hand, is a burning original. She flowers out of her handicap. “How could anyone understand how it feels to be the girl of whom there are no baby pictures?” she asks in pain. By the end, she has healed herself into an earnest and charming love affair with the school nerd.

It doesn’t all work. The end is too sweet. There is an insipid and diluting side-plot about a conceptual artist and his eccentric English father. It takes a little effort to figure out just what the government people are up to in their concern over the 20 million dollars. Their elliptical dialogue is comically appropriate, but it also clouds things.

Still, to be smart, funny, uplifting, tender and merciless, all at once, is a remarkable achievement for one novel-- particularly, for a first one.