Where Day Breaks Like a Wine Cooler : HOMEBOY<i> by Seth Morgan (Random House: $19.95;</i> 416 <i> pp; 0-394-57577-6) </i>

Hail the conquering literary hero! Seth Morgan’s “Homeboy” is a big, densely plotted, lyrically and idiomatically written first novel about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, with murder thrown in left, right and center.

Morgan’s working-class hero is Joe Speaker, a heroin-addicted pimp and strip-joint barker in San Francisco wanted by the police after a robbery in which his unschooled older partner panicked and killed a man. Joe’s main squeeze, Miss Kitty Litter, who performs at the bar he pitches for, is in love with him because, as she explains to him:

“I met a fella who wanted to love but couldn’t. He believed in love, he’d just never known it. And watching him I realized I was watching myself, and I seen that wanting to love, struggling for it, is more real than just loving. It’s deeper, stronger, more honest. The other’s too easy and cheap. For cheap, easy people. The sort who fall in love like falling off a horse. Our kind has to suffer.”

As the police close in, Joe sets up his partner, Rooski, who is killed, and his guilt over this act is at the center of the redemptive process that begins with his imprisonment.

Morgan writes in the third person, jump-cutting from place to place, protagonist to protagonist, male to female, with impressive energy and ease. Joe’s opposite number is a Lt. Tarzon, a man with a past and an ever-present Hav-a-Tampa Jewel cigar, and by convolutions of the remarkable plot, a second robbery involves the two in a murder that goes to the center of power in San Francisco on both sides of the law, and threatens Joe’s life behind bars. Indeed, people die with amazing narrative dispatch in this novel: Getting dropped into a boiling vat, being sodomized, with the collapse of a prison balcony, being decapitated in a pornographic snuff movie.

Morgan writes up a storm, sometimes too literally: “Then thunder cracked the sky like a hammer striking a gourd, spreading electric branches overhead; and the rain fell in fat drops, plucking silver nipples from the flagstones without.” One chapter, aptly titled “Hotshot,” begins with this howler: “Day broke like a wine cooler smashed suddenly on the curb of the sky, splashing the derelict building with lemon and peach, drenching its concrete crevices cherry, inking the lacework shadows of exterior catwalks and ladderways in grape.”

Say what? And when people talk in “Homeboy,” frequently they seem to be setting each other up for zingers, as when Joe tells his friend Earl, the intimate prison photographer who has confessed to him his dream of an armadillo farm: “F Stop, I don’t know what’s eatin’ your brain worse, Alzheimer’s or Weisenheimer’s.”

But these gaucheries are more than balanced by moments when Morgan, who did time himself for armed robbery, writes with clear authority of life behind bars: “I was just thinking,” Joe tells Earl, “that the aim of prisons is to correct criminals, make adults out of overgrown children. The first object you’d think would be to force them to stop having fantasy lives. But that’s all prison is, fantasy finishing school. I never learned how to direct my dreaming until I got here.”

Seth Morgan, 41, grew up on Manhattan’s upper East Side and attended Hotchkiss prep school. In 1970, he was a heroin addict and Janis Joplin’s dealer and lover. Later a pimp and alcoholic, he eventually went to prison. The upper East Side, it is gradually becoming clear, isn’t the optimal environment in which to grow up. This reviewer, who also grew up in that stretch of concrete and apartment buildings a few miles square, personally knew half a dozen suicides who shared the environs. The desolation and poverty of this novel’s milieu, while ostensibly at the other end of the social and economic spectrum, seems emotionally and metaphorically parallel.

Over the long haul, there is something sturdy and likable about the hard-writing Morgan and “Homeboy,” a big beast of a novel with a beating and evolving human heart at its center. Morgan’s women are awfully simple souls, whores with hearts “as big as Texas” who seem to come out of another era of human relations, and one can quibble with a generally simplistic tendency in most of the other characters portrayed as well. But a novel can fail or succeed on a larger and deeper principle than these details indicate.

“Homeboy” is full of the reality of human suffering and of a central intelligence taking it in and, by effort and fortitude and simple love of life, moving on. Morgan has come through several hells to make a unique literary debut. Hail again.