The Pleasure of a Little Bit of Heaven on Earth : DOMESTIC PLEASURES, <i> by Beth Gutcheon,</i> Villard Books, $20, 352 pages

It’s perfect that this book’s publication date was June, because you should read this sweet story in a hammock, with a canopy of fresh green leaves rustling above your head.

“Domestic Pleasures” is a story of how you can get to Heaven on Earth--if you don’t try too hard, if you aren’t too picky, if you get lucky.

The novel begins with the death of a man who wasn’t very nice, who cheated Martha, the woman he divorced, out of her life savings and her rightful inheritance. Martha however has rolled with the punches. She lives now with her teen-age son, Jack, in a SoHo loft.

Fate decrees that the man who will be her dead husband’s financial executor is Charlie Leveque, a Midtown attorney who originally engineered that ugly divorce. But Charlie too is divorced now, with a trouble-making, consumer-hag ex-wife, and a teen-age daughter, Phoebe, who is a world-class hell-raiser in her own right.

There’s no point in trying to summarize the plot of this dear story. For one thing, about 50 characters push and jostle their way through the novel.

“Domestic Pleasures” is set in New York--that’s the geography here. But Charlie has an ex-lady-friend whose sister lives in New Jersey, has three decent children and is married to a wife-abusing idiot swine.

Martha has a set of wonderfully glamorous very old parents who live Upstate by the beach and sincerely want Martha to marry Gillis, a handsome and glamorous old family friend who-- en passant --has fathered a baby named Fred with Martha, who decided to have Fred, even though Gillis hates family life and doesn’t ever want to get married.

Even when things get bad in this novel, things remain pretty good. How the author pulls this off is a miracle. Even when the notoriously awful teen-age Phoebe is shrieking at her far-worse mother, Patsy, it’s as if their room is inhabited by another, larger, happier, intangible spirit.

Someone, somewhere in the novel, is absolutely sure that everything is going to be OK; that these people are essentially perfect in their ordinary concerns--that life will be kind to them, and that, far more important, they will be kind to life.

Four generations here--from those Upstate, upscale grandparents, to little baby Fred. It’s no particular mystery or miracle that the gentle Martha and the slightly bewildered Charlie will end up together. The really miraculous--and beautifully handled--material here lies with the kids: The orphaned Jack who yearns for his dead father and makes a father out of any adult male he can get his hands on. The fierce, furious Phoebe, who, by leaving her flossy private school and going to a different one in Brooklyn Heights, falls in with good friends, finds her real talent, her perfect identity, and her own iron good manners.

Phoebe’s a sport and when Jack begins to call her Phoebe-Beebe, you know she’s different , ready, up for laughs; ready to live.

But any slug can be happy when they’re together with their best friends, or with people they love. Anyone can be transcendent when they’ve found their true destiny.

The real trick--and the title would imply this--is to be happy during the interstices, those moments when nothing much is happening, and when it looks as if your life might never work out the way you want it. This book is stuffed with scenes that demonstrate this quiet point.

Patsy, the ex-wife from Hell, sits down once with Charlie to talk about what went wrong with their life. (Then she goes back to being the ex-wife from Hell.) Gillis, the handsome man who hates families, says a few words to orphaned Jack about the way he lost his own father, and it explains a lot. It alleviates their loneliness.

Martha, who’s lost everything, it seems, in love, goes out to play golf with her brother, who loves her--no matter what. And Charlie, at the nadir of his career, redeems life and time by dancing to old ‘70s records with that lost, abused family out in New Jersey.

Heaven-on-Earth is what this novel is about. This must be what paradise is like.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Women Who Love Men Who Kill” by Sheila Isenberg (Simon & Schuster) .