Down the Rabbitte Hole : THE VAN, <i> By Roddy Doyle (Viking: $21; 311 pp.)</i>

Unlike the heroes of his first novel “The Commitments”--the Irish soul band now of motion-picture fame--Roddy Doyle has perfect pitch from the get-go. He can write pages of lifelike, impeccably profane dialogue without a false note nor a dull fill, economically evoking every lark and emotional plunge in the life of an entire Irish family. “The Van” is the third volume in a trilogy about the family Rabbitte.

Lately, it’s been mostly plunges for Jimmy Rabbitte, because Jimmy’s out of work. He sits at home trying and failing to read a library book, “The Man in the Iron Mask,” while his wife Veronica and son are reading for degrees that will get them someplace. The littler kids are busy learning to smoke ciggies and swear. Jimmy’s fretful fingernails are all bitten down, so he even has to ask Veronica to untie his knotted shoelace one night. In this tiny episode, Doyle brilliantly sketches Jimmy’s mingled rage, helplessness and pleasure at being mothered a bit, and Veronica’s irritable affection.

Then Jimmy’s middle-aged pub buddy Bimbo is “made redundant” (laid off) at work too, so he buys a horrible old fish-and-chips van. Upon beholding the thing, Jimmy has two questions: “How did it get greasy on the (expletive) outside?” and “Which end does it shite out of?” Still, Jimmy’s impressed, and the two switch from Guinness-gargling to fast-food entrepreneurship.

It’s a new life. The next thing you know, Jimmy’s so happy he’s dropping his drawers in the back yard, dangling his “marriage tackle” and serenading Veronica with a rock ‘n’ roll oldie John Lennon never did any nastier: “SHAKE IT TO THE LEFT/ SHAKE IT TO THE RIGHT/ DO THE HIPPY HIPPY SHAKE/ WITH ALL OF YOUR MIGHT!”

Jimmy and Bimbo bring a like exuberance to the battered-fish business. They don’t, for instance, let the van’s lack of running water trouble them--if you just scrub the crud off the inside walls every day or three, who’ll know the difference? When local teens ritually stone the van, the proprietors simply batten down the hatches and don’t lean against the walls, where large dents blossom and nearly penetrate the metal.

The same hatch-slamming procedure is followed when Jimmy’s granddaughter visits and needs changing--it wouldn’t do to let pesky health inspectors glimpse such a gross violation of code, on top of all their routine violations. In the darkness, they take care to retrieve the infant before she can crawl over and fall into the deep-fat fryer--these are commendable lads! Who’s to blame them when they accidentally mistake a diaper for a bit of frozen cod, battering and frying it and presenting it to a customer, who promptly turns from ravenous to furious? What’s he so steamed about? It’s not as if it was a used one. Pursued by the customer on a bike, Jimmy and Bimbo flee in the van, pitching frozen cod at him out the back to knock him over.

There is more than a bit o’ blarney in “The Van.” Doyle would never describe, say, a hot plate in the chips van as being clean; he has Jimmy bray, “Yeh’d ride your missis on it it’s so clean.” An ungenerous character “wouldn’t give yeh the steam off his piss if you were dyin’ o’ dehydration.” A woman seated at a pub is not simply shapely, she’s got “the fine set of lungs on her, and her arse fitted nicely on the stool; there was nothing flowing over the sides.” (True, you can see the roots in her dyed hair: “Another copule of months and she’d look like a skunk.”)

But Doyle is no sloppy green-tongued laddie belching malodorous Hibernic sentimentality. Every act, every syllable has a plausible consequence, and he stays extraordinarily close to ordinary life. Often Doyle reminds me of what I imagine Raymond Carver would be writing had he lived and quit indulging in that drab verse: propulsive stories of everyday events charged with hilarity and knowing sorrow. Like Carver, Doyle has an immensely good heart, but he’s too good a writer to give in to it.

He’s not afraid to show us coldly, for instance, the probable upshot of Jimmy’s revivified marriage: dismal attempts at adultery with women he fancies to be more high-toned than his long-suffering one-and-only. More troubling still, he depicts the miserable dissolution of his male-bonding with Bimbo, as a direct result of their success in escaping the misery of unemployment that cemented their lifelong bond in the first place. When Bimbo had more than 10 pints inside him, he was all grins, but give him sobering responsibilities, make him Jimmy’s boss, and all of a sudden they’re a two-man microcosm of Thatcher’s class-warring United Kingdom, kicking and gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.

The conclusion of “The Van” is abrupt, inconclusive, unsatisfying--that is, rigorously like life itself. But the tale itself stays with you, peopling your imagination. Doyle at his best is like a sheet of morning sun on an icy road: He dazzles without warming.