Fell Or Jumped

By John Skow

BROTHERLY LOVE

by Pete Dexter

Random House; 274 pages; $22

Pete Dexter's eerie knack for placing himself inside the skin of even the minor players in his novels may be something like perfect pitch for a musician. It is a useful trick, done with no apparent effort -- in Dexter's case with no literary showiness whatsoever -- but by itself it does not make an artist. What deepens and darkens his writing, so that art is the precise word to describe it, is a powerful understanding that character rules, that we live with our weaknesses and die of our strengths.

This fatalism was the iron at the core of Paris Trout, Dexter's last novel, which won the National Book Award. Brotherly Love deals with tough guys living brutal lives. Toward the end, in the house of an old man who sells guns, matters go sour during a deal and one man shotguns two others. The old man waits to be shot himself, because that is the way things happen; he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now two lines:

" 'Everything's over,' Peter says. 'I ain't going to hurt you.'

"The old man nods and stares out the window, waiting to be shot."

Peter Flood, the hero, is a labor racketeer because that is the family business. His slick cousin Michael is a union boss in South Philadelphia, where, as the author tells it, the Irish run the unions and the Italians own the streets. Peter's life is haunted by the death of his baby sister when he was eight. He was taking care of her on a cold day when a savage neighborhood dog ran to meet its master's car, the car skidded on ice, the baby girl ran toward the car, and Peter was too frightened of the dog to stop her.

That was when he started jumping off roofs. Not to kill himself, but to feel a stillness as he fell. Of soul, conscience? Peter doesn't know, and Dexter doesn't say. Peter goes on jumping as an adult, the way binge drinkers cycle back to booze. Four stories off a warehouse roof into a sandpile. And there is one other clue: though he has no talent except durability, he boxes hard rounds at a local gym. Nick, the owner, figures it out: Peter likes to be hit.

And maybe Peter takes satisfaction in being a dogsbody for the sleazy Michael. In any case, until his story comes to a well-told bad end, he lives detached from himself, an observer. Though Brotherly Love is intentionally a narrower, less spacious novel than Paris Trout, its quality is just as high.