The Eve of Destruction : ZEKE AND NED.<i> By Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana</i> .<i> Simon & Schuster: 480 pp., $25</i>

In his 20th novel--written in collabo ration with Diana Ossana--Larry McMurtry gives us the characters of Zeke Proctor, a part-Cherokee farmer, husband and father, and his younger friend, Ned Christie, a full-blooded Cherokee now homesteading, like Zeke and his family, in the Cherokee territory known today as Oklahoma. If they make a movie out of this book (and it’s not unlikely they will), the role of the romantic male lead goes, unquestionably, to the character of Ned--a smart, devastatingly handsome, hard-working and loyal man whose prowess as a sharpshooter is celebrated throughout the Cherokee Nation even before the events of this novel unfold.

Both Zeke and Ned are members of the Keetoowah Society, a group dedicated to the preservation of traditional Cherokee ways, formed in the aftermath of the forcible removal of 17,000 Cherokees from their native land, a march known as the Trail of Tears. When we meet Zeke and Ned, however, the Trail of Tears is well behind them. They and their families have spent years building new lives in the West, and this novel is the story of their gradual and increasingly inevitable destruction.

The writers favor a slow, leisurely pace to their storytelling: small talk about livestock and whiskey, crops, hunting, minor family feuds and women. You know as McMurtry and Ossana go into their windup that pretty soon hearts will break and bullets will fly. But the writers are in no hurry to get there.

Part of the pleasure comes from McMurtry and Ossana’s obvious enjoyment of the small scene, the seemingly incidental details of daily life in the comings and goings of characters whose lives and world are all about to change dramatically. They give us a long, careful glimpse at how Ned shoots a squirrel or the traits of Zeke’s dog; we get small talk down at the courthouse and over breakfast, recounted with a conversational authenticity and understated humor that is a McMurtry trademark.

“Zeke and Ned” has the tone of a yarn spun over a campfire with plenty of whiskey on hand and nobody in a rush to get anyplace quick. If a new character gets introduced--as several dozen do--the authors are apt to wander off with a side story or two concerning whatever odd trait or interesting piece of family history might be worth knowing.

Indeed, there’s a matter-of-fact bluntness to the storytelling that suits the bare-bones lives of the characters who inhabit the world of McMurtry and Ossana’s novel. One minute Rebecca, Zeke’s wife, is telling their 16-year-old daughter, Jewel, to snap beans for dinner. Not half an hour later, Ned has asked for and received her hand in marriage over that dinner of beans. Soon he’s saddling up his horse, preparing to ride off with his bride-to-be.

Another writer might have made more of the moment, but the authors recognize that the events unfolding here are melodramatic enough without the insertion of drum rolls. Castrating a pig, marrying off a daughter, planting corn, shooting your neighbor, burying a child: In the world of this novel, they’re part of a day.

To be sure, “Zeke and Ned” is a story of grand-scale tragedy. But it’s also about the way disaster grows out of seemingly small mistakes in judgment and flaws of character, infecting like a virus not just whole families but an entire population. The precipitating event is Zeke’s attraction to a feisty woman named Polly Beck and his desire (after 17 years of marriage to the quiet, frail but strong-willed Rebecca) to take Polly as his second wife, as allowed by Cherokee tradition.

Recognizing Zeke’s attentions to his wife, Polly’s jealous husband, T. Spade, sells Zeke a load of corn into which he’s shoveled weevils. Zeke seeks retribution but, instead of getting rid of Spade, he ends up shooting Polly, then seeking out Ned’s aid to shield him from Polly’s vengeful brothers.

When a trial in Cherokee court leads to more shootings (including that of the judge), President Ulysses S. Grant authorizes a party of marshals to hunt down Zeke and Ned. By the time the novel reaches its conclusion, the weevil incident has, at times indirectly, brought about not only murder in the double digits but also miscarriage, amputation by frostbite, blinding, beheading, drowning, rape, madness and suicide.

Recounted with even a trace of melodrama, this story would read like a soap opera. But McMurtry and Ossana favor a wry, matter-of-fact and more than faintly comical tone. In Zeke and Ned’s brutal world, a significant character may be dispatched in a sentence or two. The authors know how to sustain a drama played out over a plate of corn and vinegar cobbler, and they do it well.

Consider, for instance, their deft handling of the minor character Cracky Bolen. Cracky’s paying a visit to the home of an equally insignificant character, Marshal Dan Maples, and his wife, Wilma; he’s trying to track down Zeke and Ned in the aftermath of a blood bath in which, he reports (as he’s salting his corncob), 50 people were killed. Dan Maples “did not believe that figure for a moment, and he also did not believe it was the death figure that really interested Cracky Bolen,” write Ossana and McMurtry. “The figure that interested Cracky was Wilma’s figure, a generous, womanly figure by any standards, and particularly so by Cracky’s standards, since his own wife, Myrtle Lou, was skinny as a weed and about as unfriendly.”

Within a matter of pages, Maples is lying dead on the ground and the story moves along so fast we barely have a chance to catch the dust as he’s biting it. But first, the writers linger for a page or two over the living Maples’ obsessive suspicion that his shapely wife may be secretly selling eggs to buy herself hair ribbons. Nothing in this scene--or in the many other equally insignificant tales the writers pause to spin--plays a major or even minor role in furthering the saga of Zeke and Ned. But it’s what brings this novel to life; the authors have filled their novel with minor stories and characters, giving as much weight to small human foibles as they do to the ultimate ruin of the characters who stand at its center.

As a sad history of the Cherokee, a fundamentally peaceful tribe destroyed by the white man and brutally transplanted to Oklahoma territory, “Zeke and Ned” is less than wholly successful. While Zeke and Ned belong to a Cherokee society and eventually go to war with the white man’s law, there is little in the ways of these men or their families that enlightens the reader about the Cherokee people. Except for the sense of inevitable tragedy awaiting them, there’s little here that identifies them as belonging to any particular culture.

But ultimately, the novel isn’t diminished by that lack. For this isn’t really a story about the downfall of the Cherokee; it’s a more universal tale, a novel about bad luck that could happen in just about any culture where men covet women and carry guns. The Cherokee people, unluckier than many, don’t hold the patent on that one.

Ultimately, “Zeke and Ned” is an enjoyable, richly entertaining reading experience. Pick up this novel in search of complex characters and subtle portrayals of human psychology, however, and you may be disappointed.

McMurtry and Ossana haven’t exactly given us finely wrought, multilayered characters, but my guess is they never intended to. What they lay out instead is historical tapestry on the grand scale, wider than it is deep. In this book, a character is likely to exhibit one or two distinctive traits: an annoying talkativeness, a preoccupation with neatness of dress, a tendency toward lechery or bossiness or drunkenness, a suspicion that one’s wife may be selling eggs on the side. No matter.

Even Ned is not exactly a fully formed figure of a man. Tall, handsome, brave and strong, he possesses all the virtues of a mythic hero and no discernible flaws. Much the same can be said about his wife, Zeke’s daughter Jewel--a beautiful goddess of a woman, quiet and loyal unto death. They’re archetypes, which is exactly what we want them to be.

What McMurtry and Ossana have given us here is a piece of semi-modern mythology--part folk song, part tall tale--set against the backdrop of the post-Civil War frontier. “Zeke and Ned” belongs less to literary tradition, perhaps, than to the oral tradition of wonderful, richly textured storytelling. If the novel were shorter, it would be a great one to read out loud, passed on, embellished further over time, in direct proportion no doubt to how much whiskey the teller’s been consuming. You don’t ask yourself, as the wagon bounces you along, whether the whole thing makes total sense. You simply enjoy the ride.