Fool’s Paradise : SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME, <i> By Mary McGarry Morris (Viking: $24.95; 740 pp.)</i>

Today, a pop quiz. Between the covers of a book, if not those of a bed, what gives rise to euthanasia, burglary, theft, bunko, assault, embezzlement, vandalism and murder among our sometimes terrible, always inward tribe? (Hint: It’s also an affliction sufficiently dire to turn us into adulterers and apostates, knaves and know-it-alls, double-dealers and public drunks.) Give up? Well, if you believe the analogue of the world that Mary McGarry Morris types for us in this her third novel, the answer is no less than love itself, what the poet Yeats called “the crooked thing.”

The year is 1960, the month May, the region, picture-postcard New England, “where spring was never a season proper, so much as a narrow passage, a blink of the eye, a flicker of light from ice to green, where even in the valleys every bud, sprout, and shoot held so tight and fast it seemed certain nothing more could ever bloom or thrive again. Nothing.” Ostensibly, this is small-town U.S.A., storybook style, complete with bandstand, steepled churches, a dance hall at the lake, a drugstore with a lunch counter, and a side of the tracks so wrong “that husband and wife often looked enough alike to be brother and sister.” America as fetched up by the cynics at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in cahoots with the dark-minded poets at Burma Shave (with technical assistance by Disney, P.T. Barnum, and the Pillsbury Dough Boy).

Mainly, so says the conventional wisdom, this is America in the last hours of its innocence--before Kennedy’s assassination and Vietnam, before Watts and Watergate, before the oil embargo and white-hot inflation--modern life only minutes before history becomes a post-modern nightmare, irony the common coin for our passions. Welcome, then, to Atkinson, Vt., where “for 2 1/2 months [a] body had lain undetected, only a few miles from town, opprobrious proof, many felt, of the carelessness and disorder that were in the air, not just in Atkinson, but in the whole state, all over the country.”

Nowhere will this disorder be more keenly felt or its consequences more grave to behold than in a tumbledown, ramshackle house on Edgewood Street, the well-mortgaged home of Marie Fermoyle (rhymes with turmoil ) and her three children. There’s Benjy, 12, so anxious about his mother’s welfare and so in need of a father--or a friend--that he mesmerizes himself with TV “with its tears and love and death, lives he could turn on and off at will, much in the way he mastered his own existence. . . .”

Equally flummoxed by a world seemingly without center is Norm, the brawling high school junior, who finds in the locker room camaraderie of his baseball buddies one idealized, and sad, definition for his burgeoning manhood: “In here it was Audie Murphy and John Wayne and Knute Rockne. In here was the most he’d ever seen of truth and goodness and fair play. In here boys were men and the Gipper was all there was of sorrow and courage. . . . In here there was only unity and heroes, and the weak were never trampled, but goaded gently to strength.”

Last is beautiful Alice, as bamboozled by her own sexuality as are the men who pursue her, off to college in the fall if she can survive this summer and “that dark part of her, that taint she thought she could hide if she were good enough and kind enough and polite enough and quiet enough and neat enough and clean enough.”

At the eye of this fierce whirlwind of need and confusion is Marie, divorced, a bookkeeper at Ferdinand Briscoe’s sporting goods store, a woman loud and angry and desperate--maybe one of those women, she wonders, “who needed to be hurt in order to be loved.”

Enter now--”his coming as inevitable as the summer’s fiery sun, and as unstoppable”--one Omar Duvall, con man ordinaire, equal parts Billy Sunday and patent medicine Music Man, a rascal as much on the lam from his criminal cohorts as he is on the prowl for “purity, cleanliness, spotlessness, neat and tidy lives” he can enter and exploit. “He’d always considered himself as a religious man,” the narrator tells us, “a patriot, a man who believed in signs. Men were sent from their creator to this scraggly earth with particular missions stamped indelibly upon their brains and souls. His he knew to be Success.”

Not surprisingly, as a rake with a gift of gab big enough to fill at least one of Santa’s sacks, Duvall is a smoothie, in part because of his ability to beguile even himself. “In order to fool you,” he tells Norm at one point, “I’ve got to fool myself first. In order to sell you, I’ve got to sell myself first. . . . “ Snake oil in his veins--actually, it’s Presto Soap in his arms, “A detergent theory based on the principles of jet propulsion.” Southern sweet-talker Duvall wants everyone to like him, or better yet, to love him: “And for that, I am a fool. A fool.”

Indeed, “Songs in Ordinary Time”--the title, we learn from Miss Brastus, a “shy woman with a faint mustache” who runs the Holy Articles Shoppe, refers to that time in the summer when Catholics have no special feasts to celebrate--is a book full of condemned and crosswise fools, all of whom will one day be “hog-tie[d] with their own fears, hopes and sins.” Consider, for instance, Samuel Fermoyle, Marie’s frightened and frightening ex-husband. Here he is, trying to resist a half-pint of blackberry brandy even as he imagines the speech someone like God might make to those in attendance at his wake: “I know he ripped apart your lawn and knocked down your brand-new fence and smashed up your son’s car, impregnated your 18-year-old daughter, spit in your face, stole the rents, hurled a bottle through the movie screen, set your newspaper on fire while you were reading it, passed out and vomited at his own sister’s desperate and pitiful wedding . . . cheated and lied, hastened the death of his father . . . struck his wife, resented not only his children’s needs but their existence as well, their very being, each birth terrifying him, diminishing him, but he didn’t mean it. You see, he was drunk.”

This is, you’ve gathered, a big book--unlike a short story, the genius of a novel is not what gets left out, but what gets in--and in the main it is a book big with virtues of industry-approved story-telling: characters you know in the dark, a physical setting so thoroughly evoked you can smell its rot and hear it swivel toward the new decade, its clever plotting as logical and surprising as poker.

Yet, bigness, alas, may be this novel’s undoing, for, notwithstanding Morris’ many and meet skills, too many of these songs--there are, by one quick count, over 15 “tunes” to worry about--sound the same notes, thus giving us a melody that, apart from its sentiment or artfulness, can grow both boring and predictable.

More troubling, however, is Morris’ reliance upon the time of the novel to explain why her people behave as they do. Is it, for example, the time alone, no matter how appealing we might find the idea, that motivates Marie, a woman as savvy as she is suspicious, to fall for Duvall’s obvious claptrap? Is it the “innocence” of an era that allows Samuel, bitter and contemptuous and mistrustful, to believe from his psychiatrist blather of the sort you’d hoot over from Oprah? Is it naivete--or merely the convenience of plot--that puts Norm in league with a man he loathes?

If so, this is not history--which, real as yesterday’s heartaches, writers are in part responsible for--but romanticism, which is a lie about our ilk, and finally as much a cheapening of character as it is an insult to what in us he or she stands for.

Simply, it is not enough to declare, as Chief of Police Sonny Stoner does, that “there [are] dark forces in the universe, forces to pounce on careless men, forces that demanded appeasement.” Forces have always been dark, men always careless. Nor is it enough to lay the blame for our crookedness, in or out of love, upon the conditions of an era that, except for its icons and its technology, is little different from our own. Time, folks, is never ordinary; nor is there but one song, however beautiful it is crafted, we sing about it.