FICTION

SAILOR’S HOLIDAY by Barry Gifford (Random House: $19; 350 pp.) . “Death and destruction ain’t never more than a kiss away,” says Consuelo Whynot, the 16-year-old sex bomb whose fuse burns dangerously low throughout the last of these four linked novellas by Barry Gifford; and that pretty much sums up “Sailor’s Holiday,” the sequel to “Wild at Heart.”

Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, the delinquent lovers from the earlier book (and the David Lynch movie of the same name), are together again, Sailor having served 10 years in a Texas prison for armed robbery. They try to settle down and raise a family in New Orleans, menaced by old accomplices, new temptations, the casual violence and endemic craziness of American life. As they age (from their 30s to nearly 50, though without ever seeming to leave the 1980s), Sailor and Lula discover over and over again that although love may conquer all, it can’t control anything. Or, as a cocktail waitress tells a federal drug agent in pursuit of a dealer-cum- Santeria priest whose crimes include human sacrifice: “Seems like sometimes bein’ even a little intelligent just don’t pay.”

As befits the borderline black humorist he is, Gifford’s stock in trade is excess. His brief, deadpan, ironically titled chapters are hyper-exact about brands of clothes, cars, guns and booze. His characters’ names are as fanciful as Dickens’. The incessant murder and mayhem finally provoke uneasy giggles. Like most tough-guy writers, he’s a sentimentalist in reverse: His criminals are more interesting than their victims; his Mafia don is inevitably a philosopher king. We’re willing to forgive him, though, for one very good reason:

Great dialogue.

Gifford is one of those people with tape recorders in their heads, a master of Southern inflections along the whole arc from the Carolinas to L.A. Once his characters--lawmen, hookers, teen-age mall rats, elderly Daughters of the Confederacy, deranged survivalist killers--start talking, they come immediately, vividly to life, and the improbable lives they live seem, for a while at least, to be nothing less than the American norm.