BOOK REVIEW : Winters of Their Discontent : NORTH OF HOPE<i> by Jon Hassler</i> ; Ballantine $19.95, 528 pages

The main character in this book is the weather. “North of Hope” is a long novel with long winters, and it’s most often 20 degrees below zero.

Young Frank Healy grows up in the town of Linden Falls (Berrington is nearby), and there’s an Ojibway Indian Reservation just across the lake. The lake is formed like an hourglass. In winter, the ice freezes three feet thick and cars routinely take the shortcut across the narrow ice road from the reservation to the town and back again.

But people have died out there--including an early Catholic missionary--and thin ice is carefully marked.

Yes, the winters are long and terribly hard. Frank grows up (if indeed he ever “grows up”). That’s one of the arguments, one of the themes of this novel.

Frank works at candling eggs on the weekends and making model airplanes in his spare time. His mother dies, and he grows up under the influence of a Catholic priest and his domineering housekeeper. Frank falls in love with (or develops a crush on) a nice girl named Libby, and indeed they do dance once, together, out in a nasty little roadhouse made from a converted barn where the smells of farm animals and excrement and stale cigarettes hang in the air.

What is it with Frank? The housekeeper has told him that his mother’s dying wish was for him to be a priest. (The reader who believes that must think that nobody in this story is going to fall through that thin ice.)

Frank gets beaten by a loutish farmer when it comes to the beautiful Libby. But Frank doesn’t try very hard. Giving up Libby, and heterosexual love, and regular daily life, seems here a little bit like giving up squash for Lent--not the worst sacrifice in the world.

Frank goes into a seminary, becomes a priest, teaches young boys for about 25 years, and is pushed out again into the real world in his middle 40s. Frank is having a bout with spiritual dryness--worried about whether he should be a priest or not, and he has asked to be relocated in his old hometown, where he can serve his original parish church, and cross the frozen lake to preach to the increasingly skeptical Ojibway.

Libby turns up again, on her third husband, and still desperately in love with Father Frank. Poor Frank is bored, lonely, drinking too much rum, missing his seminary, and having enough trouble getting along with his own housekeeper to . . . to do what ?

“North of Hope” is a conundrum. There’s no conflict, in the way the reader has come to expect, because lust, as such, comes way, way down on this priest’s list of priorities--further down than making green Jell-O or folding up brown paper bags. Women don’t even make it onto his list of ordinary daydreams.

For most of these people, staying alive seems to be the only real priority. Walking from the house to the car. Overheating rooms; underheating rooms. Getting depressed, waiting for the long winter to end.

Libby, over these 25 years, has encountered bushels of problems. She expects Frank to solve them. He does solve some of them. But most of the pages here record the conversations of spiritually stunted people living a bleak existence in a Hell made of frost. Libby’s poor first husband, that farmer, has reverted to a hideous animal existence.

A sad little drug trade springs up, so obvious and amateurish that the local police must really be in a long-winter’s nap not to notice it.

Frank goes on and on to Libby about his chastity. Is Catholicism different in Minnesota than it is in Southern California? Is chastity still so prized up there “North of Hope”? Did Frank have no sexual feelings at all, even during his 20 years in the seminary?

Looked at another way, aren’t there priests who choose celibacy because of a lively dislike of screeching children and nagging wives and long Saturdays standing in line at the local K mart? Is celibacy seen in this sense a mark of particular virtue? Or simply a choice, like going to see the Ice Capades instead of Rambo?

If you asked any of the characters in this novel about these matters, they’d be far too busy getting in and out of their thick winter clothes, knocking back rum drinks and checking their thermometers to see if it’s going to hit 20 below again tonight.

Their main triumph is staying alive, and Frank’s triumph is that he alleviates their boredom and their loneliness.

You can’t ask a book to be what it’s not, but I wish I had a clearer idea of what the author thinks of his very chilly hero.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “Science and the Soviet Social Order,” edited by Loren Graham (Harvard University Press).