BOOK REVIEW : Questioning What Makes Life ‘Normal’ : CLOSING DISTANCE, <i> by Jim Oliver,</i> Putnam, $21.95; 304 pages

Jim Flowers lives in Philadelphia, owns a florist shop and is about to turn 40. His mother calls their extended family together one eventful evening and tells her four grown children--and her husband--that she has breast cancer, has had it for a long time and has put off going to the doctor simply because, that’s all.

Jim feels an awful dread that goes beyond his fear for his mother’s life. He is gay, has been losing a little weight lately, and can’t bring himself to go in to be tested for symptoms of AIDS. It’s not simply the prospect of death that has Jim spooked. He’s gone into a kind of midlife holding pattern.

His former lover, wealthy, handsome and kind Bill Payne (read the name out loud to see what he might stand for), made an uncool move a couple of years before, suggesting that they move in together, become a real item, make a real commitment. Jim, for reasons that aren’t completely clear, backed out in unseemly haste. He now lives a life of glum celibacy.

Maybe one reason for his flight is his family: heterosexual, conventional, business-oriented, prosperous and--until Jim’s mother becomes ill--communicating on only the most shallow level. But this exceptionally sacrificing mother changes all that. Faced with that final curtain, the family finally begins to speak.

Part of Jim Oliver’s purpose here is to question the issues of secrecy and what constitutes a “normal” life. Jim Flowers’ dad, a fairly straightforward businessman, manufactures meat pies for a living, with machines making the “fingerprint” ridges on assembly-line pie crusts, gazillions of them. What a strange way to live, when you think about it!

Jim’s older brother, Stu, has married a world-class pill name Alexa and plots to embezzle funds from his own company and disappear. Mary Alice, Jim’s rich sister, is worried sick about her own husband’s health; because his blood pressure medicine has made him impotent, she’s having a meaningless affair.

Bea, Jim’s comparatively poor sister who married a plumber, gained about 200 pounds and spends her days ironing school uniforms for her kids, does not seem to be living a particularly happy life, either. Another of the siblings, Cliffie, was run over in an accident before he could do much of anything in life. So, if this is life, Jim Oliver suggests, what’s the big-wow about being gay?

But Oliver’s character, Jim Flowers, is much more ambivalent. He seems to feel that if he adapts the strategy of a lizard on a rock, if he remains paralyzed, does nothing, goes to work, pays his bills, pretends to his family in a half-hearted sort of way that he isn’t gay, he can avoid what is directly in front of him--his own diagnosis, his own imminent death.

But sometimes, the author suggests, disease coupled with truth can heal. Jim’s mother, because of some cancerous lesions in her brain or because she has always had the capacity for extraordinary honesty, begins, from her bed of pain, to tease gently at her son. Everybody knows everything about everybody. She and her husband, and everybody else, know he is gay. So why doesn’t Jim bring around that nice friend of his, Bill Payne?

Jim is terrified. The issue isn’t death, but the terror of death, and that terror might come from a wasted, unfelt, meaningless life.

Jim is most probably dying, but all of us are absolutely dying! (We just begin to notice it at 40.) Is Jim going to zombie himself into a living death, or go ahead, take a chance on life, family, love? There are things to quibble about in this narrative. If Jim is so scared of AIDS, why doesn’t Bill give it one passing thought? Why do some characters seem to know what’s going on in other parts of the novel without being told?

But these are quibbles, nothing more. The fictional questions the author asks here are large, and he answers them in warmhearted, decent, affectionate ways.