BOOK REVIEW : Fighting Happiness Like Father, Like Son : SECOND SON, <i> by Stephen Stark,</i> Henry Holt, $19.95, 374 pages

“Second Son” is a loving, beautiful, melancholy novel about growing up in death’s shadow, with no reasonable hope of happiness, and how, with luck, happiness may surprise us by its unreasonable and unexpected appearance. It’s also about the redemptive power of love, and, more surprisingly, the redemptive power of work.

Jack Pleasance has been out of college and working for a year with his father when he decides to bail. He knows this desertion will break his father’s heart, but then life together has become unbearable, and Jack must split or go nuts. He’s so upset that even after he moves to another town and takes up with a nice woman, when that woman--after a year--even begins to mention the dreaded word love, Jack leaves without warning or a word of explanation.

He ends up in yet another town where no one knows him, mowing lawns for a living. He begins an affair with a dimwit woman in her 40s, Sylvia, whose lawn he mows, and becomes acquainted with an illiterate day worker, Dean. This is about as deep into life as Jack cares to go. When he and Dean go out to buy some dope from a redneck sociopath named Chalky, and Chalky shoots his own dog for the fun of it, it seems appropriate somehow. This is a hard and awful world. Jack checks out Chalky’s young wife, Sandy, who carries a lot of Chalky’s bruises on her, but he can’t allow himself to think too much about it.

Just what did Jack leave behind when he left his father? An older, much beloved brother, Roy, who has died in Vietnam, and something far sadder, less explicable, more opaque: the fact that when Jack was 5, his mother hanged herself in the living room, and it was he and his brother who found her.

Jack’s father, a terribly hard-working “fix-it” man, has been working ever since to “fix” her death. He had tried to keep his wife from killing herself, and failing that, has poured limitless energy and sorrow into “fixing” everything and everyone in the town in which he lives. He works for the poor without pay, he visits the bedridden and changes their fouled sheets; he has sentenced himself (and his sons) to an austere life of loneliness, atonement, penance.

For the past 21 years, Jack’s father, Addie, has expected nothing from life. So far as he is able, he has sentenced himself to a living death, so it is with considerable surprise that he notices one of Jack’s old girlfriends, Karen, coming on to him and falling in love with him. Addie is full of doubts and sorrow, but Karen is beautiful and determined. Soon Addie is not only making love to this intelligent, loving woman, but he’s stopped chain-smoking. It may be that he wants to live.

Over in that other town, Jack has his hands full with the incredibly stupid, sex-crazed Sylvia. Jack’s life, in many ways, mimics his dad’s. Jack is a loner, he lives in a trailer, he wants--or thinks he wants--nothing more than a day’s very hard work, a few drinks and smokes with Dean, and hopefully uncomplicated sex with stupid Sylvia.

But he makes a mistake and lends a book to the wife of the murderous Chalky. One harmless conversation about Hemingway and Jack and Sandy become an item. And, as with his dad, the demands of life begin to tug at him.

“Second Son” is a coming-of-age novel, and some of the rituals are conventional: blood must be shed, a desirable woman must be won, etc. But the other part of coming of age, Stephen Stark suggests, is to be able to accept your own father as a man, in both his limitations and his sexuality. The other imponderable upon which Stark insists is the beauty and power of work that, even when love fails, can be the bond that holds men together. “Second Son” begins with a scene in which father and son, although estranged, work together as almost one person. And, in the end, it is a work-induced crisis that forces the two back together.

This is a sad book, in many ways. The life here is hard, and the rewards are few. Thank God for weird Sylvia in this morose book. She teeters around in her high heels, howls for more sex, almost gets killed and never gets clued in to what’s happening around her. Without wild cards like her, life might be too profound and melancholy to live through.