BOOK REVIEW : Ray of Hope Escapes From Hell : PAGAN BABIES by Greg Johnson Dutton $20; 320 pages

This is a novel about growing up Catholic, growing up homosexual and growing up. It examines--not for the first time, but with originality and measured affection--the strange polarity between Catholic elementary school (as some of us remember it) and the genuine spiritual consolation that the church can sometimes offer.

The subject of sex-as-sin is delicately examined here. Is having sex a sin, or does having sex carry so many consequences that absolution is inherent in the act? Is the “penance,” in other words, built in?

Janice Rungren and Clifford Bannon find themselves growing up lonely and miserable in the East Texas town of Vyler (pronounce it out loud to get the drift). Indeed, their respective lives start out badly and just get viler.

Janice knows that she was “an accident”; her mother won’t have any more children and is an agoraphobic to boot. Her father drinks and bashes her mother from time to time. Clifford lives alone with his divorced, manic-depressive mother, who bills herself as a widow so that she can deal herself into the very dubious comforts of St. John Bosco, Vyler’s Catholic church.

Clifford and Janice meet in the third grade in an elementary school from Hell--a place that sounds like parody if you haven’t been to one but that is perfectly described if you count St. Anselm’s, St. Dominick’s or St. Francis of Assisi among your alma maters.

Yes, nuns did waltz through the aisles and shout and shriek and rain down ferocious blows on all of us, but we learned about multiplication and the Immaculate Conception, so what’s the big deal?

The author here attempts to look steadily at what this strange education does to lonely children, depressed children, children whose sexuality is still in question. (It almost goes without saying that this is a very depressing tale, very much in the dark tradition of Richard Yates, who loved to spin out a dark story for hundreds of pages and then grudgingly stick on an eight-line happy ending, though you knew he didn’t approve of it.)

Clifford is gay, although he hardly knows what that means at first, and Janice has a strong, rebellious, aggressive sex drive. Janice pursues Clifford from grade school on, with moderate success. She gets his body from time to time, but his mind and heart are elsewhere. Part One ends with a terrible calamity, when this sad pair are both still in their wretched teens.

Part Two finds Clifford and Janice down in Atlanta living separately, seeing each other from time to time. Janice is into heavy promiscuity, getting some private revenge on the terrible nuns of her youth, trying to forget about her calamity, drowning in sex and drugs, until she finally finds a nice (but strange) man named Jack. They plan to marry.

Clifford, meanwhile, lives the gay life. His new lover, Will Prather, barely makes his way onto the page before he goes into an AIDS coma. So, who do you think Clifford is going to fall in love with? Yes, it’s Jack. And Janice doesn’t know.

There are many sad books in which orphans starve and populations are machine-gunned and men are maimed, but “Pagan Babies” deals with a much more common sadness: drinking coffee alone in a single apartment, calling a “friend” who doesn’t want to talk to you, living alone, in a life without meaning. Living without hope or affection.

The “Pagan Babies” here are Janice and Clifford, banished from the consolation of their faith largely because of those crazy nuns from their demented elementary school. They just can’t bring themselves to believe what they learned. (Except that St. Therese of Liseux features prominently here, a perky girl who achieved saintliness through suffering and dying an early and horrible death.)

So what is it that happened to the very short-lived Will Prather, who says hello in this story, introduces Clifford to “love” and then dies a horrible, early death? Is there some indirect saintliness involved here? And what about the grindingly unhappy Janice, who asks her lovers for “penance” in bed? Are saintliness, salvation, redemption just around the corner for these poor souls? The author suggests gently that we once again check out these eternal questions.

I have only one worry about this novel. In order to get the story to work out the way he wants it, the author has a nurse say to Clifford after he’s taken his AIDS test, “A false negative is quite rare.” Is this true, or is the author bending reality just a little to get the happy ending he needs?

“Pagan Babies” is the real thing, though. It’s an honest look at several varieties of hell, from the third grade to grim gay bars, but it’s suffused with a wistful hope of Heaven.