FICTION

HOT WATER by Don Wallace (Soho Press: $18.85; 298 pp.) . One of the publisher’s blurbs for “Hot Water” notes that it’s perhaps the only novel that “combines tournament bass fishing, the ‘New Coke’ debacle and Latin American counterinsurgency in a single comic plot.” True. And more. It’s the tale of how some likable folks from Valhalla, Miss., with outlandish hobbies try to dodge sharks and barracudas of the human variety and snag a hook on the biggest lunker of all: the Meaning of Life.

Coca-Cola bottler Garfield Foote is fired for protesting the company’s plan to change Coke’s hallowed formula. Disillusioned with working for wages, he hopes to become a professional fisherman. He obsessively trains his friends to compete as a team called the Bass Commandos, wearing fatigues and using high-tech electronic gear that would put Tom Clancy’s submariners to shame.

Meanwhile, his wife, Virginia Roy, throws herself into “weekend warrior” competitions in which she wears fatigues and develops into a dead shot with a paint pistol. A fund-raiser and recruiter for the Contras urges her to try her hand at the real thing. Then her con-man brother--whose past misdemeanors are the main reason why her only pregnancy ended in a miscarriage and why Gar’s name is tainted in bass circles--reappears after years on the lam with big-money plans for them all.

“Hot Water” climaxes in Las Vegas, where the year’s biggest bass tourney and a soldier-of-fortune convention happen simultaneously. Author Don Wallace, who grew up in Long Beach, keeps the action and laughs coming fast. But he also keeps reminding us that these all-too-satirizable people are real, as when Gar visits a toy store and is devastated by a vision of his unborn son: “the little one who has always been there, keeping pace with me, a questioning smile on his lips, as if he were asking, ‘Would I be like this, Daddy?’ ”