FICTION

CHEAP TICKET TO HEAVEN by Charlie Smith (Henry Holt: $25, 286 pp.). Jack and Clare do not rob banks because that’s where the money is, not really--not even for the thrills, the danger, the chance to swagger. They’re after something more real and less tangible--some kind of redemption, revenge against their parents, the opportunity to live entirely in the present. “Banks were like monuments to their love,” writes Charlie Smith in this, his fifth, novel recounting Jack’s words to his wife and partner in crime: “Going to a bank was like going to the Acropolis to see the Parthenon. Here was the heart of things, the symbol of their love and their separateness. . . . It was like having all your bills consolidated in one easy payment.”

“Cheap Ticket to Heaven” is a brilliant, funny, cold, fascinating and disturbing novel, a Bonnie-and-Clyde adventure story with a philosophical bent that aches for a Grateful Dead gambling-country soundtrack (“Jack Straw” comes to mind). Smith isn’t particularly interested in explaining why Jack and Clare lead lives of crime and, indeed, for much of the book they are in retirement; he wants to evoke, instead, the pressures of choice, of certain turns of mind, pressures he hints at near the novel’s close with references to “Coriolanus” and, of all things, “Peter Rabbit.”

Throughout “Cheap Ticket to Heaven” the pair are on the run, in search of peace or away from authority, but they travel lightly, without hurry, expecting either to deliver or to accept death at any given moment and often helping others weaker than themselves. Their end is predictable, a bloody mess after Jack and Clare have exacted a measure of justice from their foes; the trip is worth taking for Smith’s piercing, lyrical language. Jack and Clare in his hands are the most honest people imaginable, intelligent and conscientious, criminal not by nature but by the company they were forced, early and late, to keep. “Cheap Ticket to Heaven” is a tour de force but not, clearly, for either the squeamish or the morally certain.