Normal People Acting Abnormally : SMOKE, <i> By John Ed Bradley (Henry Holt: $23; 400 pp.)</i>

The setting for John Ed Bradley’s fourth novel is the eponymous small town, Smoke. Whatever metaphorical fires once burned in this South Louisiana podunk were extinguished years ago. Ernie Mason’s bakery shop still serves the occasional sweet roll and Dunbar’s Camera & Books might welcome a handful of customers on a particularly good day. For downtown action, that’s about it. The guitar shop, five-and-dime and Delta Theater have folded. The busiest cash register key at the struggling Hometown Family Goods store reads “No Sale.”

Everything from news to sexually transmitted diseases comes to Smoke late or not at all. There’s a dingy cathouse down the road named Babylon, but some of the patrons sidestep its B-girls to spend the night dancing alone or just watching old movies on TV with their female companions. Even the Smoke High marching band can’t march without tripping over itself, let alone play in unison. Excitement? It’s good barbecue or a lively Cajun chank-a-chank tune on the radio.

Nothing much is happening, in short, when narrator Pace Burnette comes back to his hometown. Nothing much happens after he arrives, either. Even a little kidnaping fails to jolt Smoke out of its Sominex slumber. Defined more by place than plot, “Smoke” is a literary quilt whose panels range from lassitude to listlessness. The book’s characters are Deep South slackers, equally interested in early-bird Bloody Marys--or afternoon gin and tonics--and in bemoaning their city’s plight.

Burnette is a 28-year-old first-time novelist bearing a slight resemblance to Bradley himself. Bradley’s debut novel “Tupelo Nights” also was a vaguely autobiographical account of former college football star John Girlie, running through his 20s with neither purpose nor plan. Like Girlie, Burnette is less participant than interloper: He may act, yet he’s likelier to be acted upon. Smoke promptly sucks up Burnette’s erudition and ambition like a backwater black hole. He aspires to become the new voice in Southern Gothic literature, but it looks like Burnette will settle for getting continually drunk and just fading away. “In a moment of clarity, perhaps the only real one I’d had since moving back home, I recognized my life as being over,” Burnette says in a moment of despair.

The Smoke that welcomes Burnette back is filled with a wealth of memories and a minimum of promise. With a journalist’s eye for detail and a poet’s ear for language, Bradley, an accomplished sportswriter, makes Smoke feel as real as Pascagoula or Bogalusa but still slightly otherworldly “The city’s people are normal people acting a little bit abnormally.”

The new Monster Mart, which feels like a Wal Mart in thin disguise, has pushed downtown businesses into collapse or its brink. The Hometown Family Goods store, where Burnette passes many of his idle hours, lacks the Monster Mart’s selection and slick marketing. Its aisles are empty except for the occasional motorist seeking directions to go somewhere else. The Zinc Lunch Counter is Hometown’s only draw. Chef Ruby Dean Clark’s griddle sizzles with pancakes and fried-egg orders all morning.

As Hometown’s fourth general proprietor, Burnette’s boyhood pal Jay Carnihan blames Monster Mart for Smoke’s misfortunes. More to the point, he blames Rayford Holly, Monster Mart’s grandfatherly billionaire owner, for killing off small-town America, and as punishment, he kidnaps him. Carnihan wants Holly to apologize for his alleged capitalistic crimes; until he does, Holly will remain Carnihan’s captive.

The kidnaped Holly comes across as a cross between Wal Mart founder Sam Walton and Colonel Sanders. Holly is prone to bouts of crying one minute, quickly followed by homespun marketing tips and folksy aphorisms about romance. “No love ever began between two people that wasn’t a mistake. Love in the beginning is meant to be wrong,” Holly says while flipping pancakes at Ruby Dean’s lunch counter.

Flipping pancakes? Holly may have been kidnaped, but it’s Burnette and Carnihan who immediately become hostage to him. Bored by his billions and hungry for adventure, Holly is actually eager to be dragged (without so much as a fight) into this low-rent caper. It’s the biggest thing to hit him and Smoke since the Monster Mart first opened its doors.

The kidnaping is also “Smoke’s” most interesting section, and not because there’s much drama about when--or if--Holly will apologize. Instead, Bradley in this part finally lets his colorful characters interact, rather than spinning them solo in their own private orbits. As in “Tupelo Nights,” nearly every character (except the narrator) is distinct and memorable, yet their personalities are not magnified until they start bouncing off one another. Bradley also populates “Smoke” with two memorable women, and while they inevitably land in some romantic tangle they’re real: complicated and charismatic.

Bradley himself is a weird presence in “Smoke.” In one jarring passage, Burnette reads from his novel “Strange Weather.” Burnette selects a scene lifted almost straight from Bradley’s “Tupelo Nights.” The “Tupelo Nights” scene, John Girlie’s near-incestuous encounter with his mother, is among that novel’s most vivid chapters. In “Smoke,” however, Bradley does not let the reader decide whether it’s a good scene: He openly holds it up for ridicule. “When I finished reading I looked up to find everyone staring at me with equal parts shock and incredulity,” Burnette says. That’s saying it sweetly: His audience really thinks “Strange Weather” is a crock. Bradley may know what this is all about, but it’s his secret: We haven’t a clue.

The loquacious Holly tells Burnette at one point that the mark of fine writing is “the ability to make that which is strange to our experience seem as though we ourselves have actually lived it.” Bradley accomplishes this admirable goal frequently, and yet much of “Smoke” drifts just beyond our grasp.

Bradley tells us a lot of the characters in this novel cry. While their lives may strike us as empty and aimless, that doesn’t mean they necessarily come across as sad. Bradley’s predicament here is like that of a comedian who follows the occasional flat joke by remarking, “Now, that’s funny!” Whatever anguish his characters are supposed to feel remains elusive: it doesn’t hold the page. It’s ethereal, like smoke.