Labor’s Love Lost : STRIKING IT RICH, <i> By Craig Vetter (William Morrow: $18.95; 212 pp.)</i>

Faced with a disintegrating marriage, a shrinking market for free-lance journalism and a looming 40th birthday, the narrator of this diverting first novel packs his Ford with camping equipment and takes off for the Wyoming oil fields. He’s heard that the paychecks are huge and the qualifications minimal, and he naively expects to return a new man; flush, toughened, and with a notebook full of material for a best seller based upon his experiences.

The fact that a background in English literature and some recreational mountain-climbing experience may not be the best preparation for the life of an oil-field roustabout hasn’t deterred him. As he tells an editor friend, he’s “tired of living in my head . . . of being the mayor of a broken old chair.”

His destination is Westin, Wyo., where he’s heard that any man with the ability to bend down and move a length of pipe from here to there can earn a thousand a week before overtime, even if the only union card he carries is the Authors’ Guild and his only previous mechanical experience is changing the ribbon cartridge on his printer.

Once over the Donner Pass and into Nevada, his euphoria dissipates rapidly. The landscape looks like “the bones of whatever it was when it was alive,” and an overturned, abandoned U-Haul in the highway median threatens to turn into a metaphor for his own adventure. At his first pit stop, he hears that all the motels are full, that the cops will run you out if you camp in town and the ranchers will shoot if you pitch a tent on their land; and that the reason oil hands are clean-shaven is that explosives set beards on fire. He meets a carpenter who tells him that the guys on the rigs are the same ones who made their first zip guns when they were 13 and gave themselves tattoos with ice picks; that the only fellow he knew who got rich in the fields lost his right hand in an accident. When his savvy informant steals the battery out of our hero’s car, his new life is off to a running start.

After a night passed sleeping in a reeking hot-dog stand under the rodeo arena bleachers, a morning spent slashing off his beard in a filthy service station and an unproductive hour in the local Job Service office, the narrator learns that the best way to get a job is to hang around the bars. It’s the most encouraging news he’s heard, and by the end of the day, he’s not only employed but he has also acquired a roof over his head, though only the author can do justice to the condition of the walls, floor, furniture and sanitary facilities, which require an entire thesaurus of new synonyms for squalor.

The actual adventures on the job itself are calculated to make readers revise all their cherished notions about honest, hard work in the open air and the salt-of-the-earth types who do it. To recount them here would be larceny, because they’re the sum and substance of the book that Craig Vetter has written, every word of which was not only earned by the sweat of his brow but also almost cost him his life. Maybe he should have turned back when he heard a man at a lunch counter deliberately un-correct his grammar, but if he had, he wouldn’t have met the woman named Monday or had enough material for this hilariously corrosive novel.