BOOK REVIEW : Off-Handed Humor for Family in Stress : PARADISE NEWS <i> by David Lodge</i> ; Viking; $21; 294 pages

You are a low-paid theology instructor in a British city very much like Birmingham. An aunt who has been living for years in Hawaii phones to say she is dying of cancer and needs to see you. What do you do?

You book a holiday package-tour.

That is one of David Lodge’s nicely incongruous answers which, given the even more incongruous questions posed by modern life, makes perfectly good sense. Good sense of this kind--being the clown who capers after the lion tamer is much more sensible than being the lion tamer--is a Bronx cheer in our blighted and burned-out Bronxes.

Sudden visits to the dying and bereaved are not affordable with today’s air fare structures. Package holidays, on the other hand, are available to almost anyone. Which is why the opening of “Paradise News” has two stiff figures in dark wool suits queuing up at the airport along with pastel-shirted, camera-draped sun seekers of Travelwise Tours.

They are Bernard Walsh, the theologian, and his father, Jack, who grumbles, mislays his passport among the Scotch bottles in the duty-free store, and sets off the metal detector with his Our Lady of Lourdes medallion. It is Jack whom Bernard’s aunt, Ursula, mainly wants to see; but the package-tour prices are based on double occupancy.

David Lodge is the author of “Small World” and “Trading Places,” two amusing satires of academic life. Such satire is a British sub-genre, going back at least to “Lord Jim” and up through the novels of Malcolm Bradbury with whom, Lodge says himself, he is often confused.

“Paradise News” is frequently amusing, but it bumps along with a certain aimlessness. Jack is hit by a car almost upon arrival in Hawaii and has to confine most of his complaining to a hospital bed. Bernard falls in love with the driver, an assertive and unconventional woman who works as a “personal counselor.” He cheers up his aunt, gets her financial affairs in order, discovers a forgotten stock certificate worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and is able to get her into a comfortable and expensive nursing home for the last months of her life.

Bernard is conscientious but melancholy. For years, he was a Catholic priest and taught at a seminary. Modern theology, whittling away the concepts of a personal God and personal immortality, whittled his faith away as well.

For a while, giving up the possibility of proving the Deity’s existence, Bernard was content with the impossibility of disproving it. That was a meager diet, though; and after embarking on an unsuccessful love affair--potency as well as faith eludes him--he goes for one of Lodge’s good-sense solutions. When you lose your belief, it is only logical to become a theologian.

All this is told amiably enough, and with moments of real sharpness. Lodge’s fictional energy flags, though. Bernard’s fellow tour members are a fairly feeble collection of comedy stereotypes. A professor who is working on the anthropology of tourism serves mainly to deliver an entertaining Lodgean thought about how travel is wearing out the planet. “The Mediterranean is a toilet without a chain,” he complains.

A good deal of the book, in fact, is a series of opportunities for Lodge to discourse on such things as process theology, the financial terrors of American health care, what Hawaii is like, and the need for a family--in this case Jack and Ursula--to confront and talk out shadows from the past.

The book’s weakest part is clearly intended as its climax. Yolande Miller, driver of the car that hit Jack, teaches Bernard not only how to love but also how to have sex. She is all energy and good thoughts, and quite as honest and commendable as Bernard himself. But where the latter has a decided, if droopy, character of his own, Yolande is nothing but healthy sentiments.

Worse, for somebody teaching the joys of sex, she is quite unjoyous. Bernard’s week-long course in sensitivity training, turning him from a discouraged male to a rampant one, is all therapy and no sex.

Next: Chris Goodrich reviews “The Road to Extrema” by Bob Reiss (Summit Books).