BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Sly and Oblique Tale Tackles Love and Loss With Humor : IN SEARCH OF SNOW: A Novel <i> by Luis Alberto Urrea</i> ; HarperCollins $20, 258 pages

“Years ago,” the prologue begins; barely two pages later, in typography that eliminates the indentation at the beginning of the paragraph, it ends: “McGurk and Bobo knew there wouldn’t be a siren for hours.” It’s meant to draw you in.

“In Search of Snow” by Luis Alberto Urrea is the story of Mike McGurk; of his love and his loss and, you guessed it, his coming of age. The main action takes place in rural Arizona in the mid ‘50s.

Mike and his dad, Turk, have been wandering around the Southwest since the kid was a little guy; Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, finally Arizona. Turk--nee Wallace, but he won’t own up to a name like that--has a shaved head and a gunfighter mustache, a set of mechanic’s skills, and a good ol’ boy attitude. Besides his exaggerated code of manliness, all he’s got is his boy, who very often seems just that, even though he’s 29.

Turk periodically engages in illegal bare-knuckle fights, for the cash and his greater macho glory. They’ve been at their current gas station for a while, out in the middle of nowhere, mortgaged to the eyeballs. Mike finds himself wondering why the hell he’s doing what he’s doing, hating the desert and sporadically wishing his father were dead.

Following a paragraph enumerating the father’s impressive list of failures, the chapter ends by saying: “In a family with no word for love, Mike couldn’t easily explain why he had chosen to stay. But without him there, his father wouldn’t have survived a week.” All Mike knows is that some day he wants to see snow.

Then Turk’s brother, Gideon, stops by; he’s a successful Long Island doctor, ferrying his nubile, almost 20-year-old daughter, Lily, out to California to college. As different from Mike in age and temperament--she’s a college hipster--as could be, they fall for each other. When she splits, the rest of the book is set in motion.

Turk decides to fight Ramses Castro, who is not only less than half Turk’s age, but the demented grandson of his old Apache buddy, Delbert Sneezy. (Ramses once stripped and tied young Mike to a stake in the desert, when they were boys.) Warned by several people not to take on Ramses, Turk fights anyway and gets absolutely creamed. Turk goes down at the first punch and can’t even remember what happened.

Bobo Garcia, an ex-wrestler, offers the necessary counterpoint. (He was hired at the gas station by Turk the very same night.) Referred to as “21 the day he was born,” Bobo is as wise as Mike is naive. He starts work at the Texaco and becomes friendly with Mike.

Since the fight with Ramses, Turk is still not right. A couple of weeks go by and the old man starts to unravel. He and his boy get drunk; they listen to records together. Turk does his best to reach out. Then he dies.

Mike goes on a kind of grief rampage. He takes off across the desert drinking and imagining prehistoric oceans. Eventually he winds up at an Apache bar and is about to get whomped by Ramses Castro when Bobo saves him.

The two friends go to Turk’s funeral, which is a sweet little comic masterpiece in itself: “It was a boneyard off the highway. Cowboys had been buried there, and their miserable little headstones were made out of cement, with crosses drawn in them with wet fingers and names scrawled around the designs. . . .”

And lurking nearby? Ramses Castro, who by this point begins to seem like the reappearing coyote of Native American lore, the trickster character.

After the old man is deposited in the ground, they set off for Bobo’s hometown, of McQueen, Ariz. There they find Bobo’s aged mother and father, caged birds, dogs, a pair of grown-up twin girls and six little girls. This is in addition to grape arbors, gardens, voluminous amounts of food and love. Mike is convinced he’s gone to heaven.

But nothing lasts forever. After planning to give all his money to the Garcias, things start to go awry. One of the twins, it turns out, is pregnant by the son of the manager of the town’s company store. The guy has just skipped town.

Bobo and Mike, in a comic set piece that goes far beyond itself and involves the company store, a tow truck, a car belonging to the local sheriff and, of course, Ramses Castro, bring the action full circle.

They return it to the prologue that begins the book.

Urrea’s first novel has the slender cast of a fable. It’s more a question of control. The structure itself links the prologue to the end of the novel; it also leaves the last scene to, who else, Ramses Castro. Sly and oblique, this is a very, very funny book.