FICTION

LESSONS IN SURVIVAL by Laramie Dunaway (Warner: $19.95; 424 pp.) It’s like eating chocolate truffles. A lot of them. For breakfast. Laramie Dunaway is clever, witty, mordant, ripe with repartee and riposte. So are her characters: The prodigy, the principal, the producer, the teller, the cop on the beat, all emit epigrams like B.O. In the middle of sex: “I’m trying not to think.” “How do you do that?” “Become a Republican.” While fleeing the police in a tense scene: “Don’t make fun of lepers.” “Sorry . . . the dermatologically disadvantaged.” Four hundred pages of when sally met parry. It gets crowded.

All of which detours attention around a bang-up story, full of acute commentary on the human condition of the ‘90s whenever Dunaway stops to inhale. The plot thickens on Page 1, with Blue Erhart hounded by the tabloids at the school where she teaches biology (in a style vivid enough to rate a book by itself). After 20 years in the slammer, her bank-robber parents--”kind of a hippie version of Bonnie and Clyde” with unloaded shotguns, who’d mailed their withdrawals to worthy causes--are being released. The doting parents had brought 10-year-old Blue along on the heists, presumably on the theory that the family that preys together stays together. Blue remains resentful, especially of Mom, who’d declined parole 10 years earlier in a gesture of solidarity with Dad. Free at last, Blue’s folks, bored, rob a bank two days later. Blue, burdened, pursued by movie deals, decamps for the Bend, an Arizona retreat where there are no rules, no messages, just a casual messiah called Thomas Q--whose perfection is underscored by his opinion of Grandpa Walton: “I never did trust him. He had a weird look in his eye, like he had some very racy magazines stuffed under his mattress.” And this is just a sample.

Everyone gets together, more or less, Blue ending up with a wanna-be producer, to whom she has the gall to say: “Can’t you just speak to me? No clever patter, no snappy dialogue.” Jeez.