BOOK REVIEW / FICTION : A Funny Tale About the Ordinary, Amazing Folks of Grouse County : THE END OF VANDALISM <i> by Tom Drury</i> ; Houghton Mifflin $21.95; 321 pages

You don’t have to sell the house, uproot the family and change careers to find out if life would really be better in a place like Grouse County, Iowa. Reading Tom Drury’s novel gives you the whole picture, and by the time you’ve met his cast of 58, you should be able to tell if you’d fit in.

Thanks to a considerate list of characters at the end of “The End of Vandalism,” keeping the people straight isn’t a problem. In any case, some of them are children and play relatively minor roles. The rest are both distinctive and memorable.

Even without the list, you wouldn’t ever confuse Larry Longhair, the itinerant gambler, with Deputy Sheriff Ed Aiken, or mix up Louise Darling, who eventually marries Ed, with Joan Gower, who catches people at odd moments to read them Bible verses. Louise’s ex-husband, Tiny Darling, who works as a plumber when he isn’t busy as a burglar, is a true original. There’s no chance of mistaking him for anyone else; Tiny doesn’t even lend himself to comparison.

Tiny plays a small but heavily symbolic role in the book. In the first chapter, we learn that he smashed up the vandalism collage at the high school’s “End of Vandalism” dance. The display had been built in shop class and consisted of a “row of tall, pointed wooden slats with a double-hung window built in and a flashing yellow light bolted to one side”--items chosen because picket fences, windows and the warning lights placed by the highway department on bridges are the most popular targets for juvenile pranksters.

Vandalism is apparently a real problem in Grouse County. At one point a couple of adolescents climb the water tower and spray paint the names of rock stars on it. The author also mentions an out-of-state Mercedes defaced with “This is Indian Land.” (The car belonged to a Colorado developer browsing around Iowa for building sites, but that’s not really an excuse, just an explanation.)

Even Louise Darling, Sheriff Ed Aiken’s intended, has a bit of vandalism on her record. Louise once sneaked into the boys’ locker room and spray painted the football helmets, an event remembered by people not even in Louise’s graduation class. There are other antisocial acts committed in Grouse County, but few are quite as serious. Outhouse-tipping, of course, is no longer as common as it once was, now that virtually everyone has indoor plumbing.

“The End of Vandalism” is a remarkably funny book without being in the least frivolous. The humor, in fact, comes less from the incidents themselves as from Drury’s arresting style, which is both utterly matter of fact and astonishingly vivid.

Take Joe Norman, Dan’s father and a retired pharmaceutical salesman. Twice widowed, Dan has tried an assortment of hobbies with limited success. After abandoning golf when he ran an electric cart into the clubhouse, he took up wood burning, “but lost interest once he had put decorative brands on every wooden item in the house.”

Now he carries a video camera with him, hoping to tape something newsworthy. But because Grouse County has never had either a runaway felon beaten by the Highway Patrol or a convenience-store robbery, Joe is reduced to taping the mailman on his daily rounds, an old friend washing a Buick and the nighttime antics of raccoons raiding trash cans. If you need an antidote to “Action News” or the Metro section of this paper, Drury’s book works wonders.

Not everything is comedic. Certainly when Dan Norman follows up on a phone tip and discovers a baby abandoned in a box in a shopping cart at the Hy-Vee parking lot, we know we’re still in the 1990s, the decade of the bizarre. But because it’s Grouse County, the whole town leaves gifts for the baby, who seems destined to have the local version of a happy childhood, once the adoption can be finalized.

And when Louise finally marries Dan, their bliss is marred by tragedy--although somehow Drury leaves us convinced that after Louise returns from a visit to relatives in Minnesota, she and Dan will recover from their sorrow.

Although Drury has been compared to Garrison Keillor and Raymond Carver, he’s really in a class of one, creating characters who only seem larger than life because life itself, in Grouse County, Iowa, may not be quite as theatrical as it is in some other places. It’s a question of relativity. Ordinary people have the chance to be amazing when the world around them is tranquil, even humdrum.