THE HILL CODE

By John Skow

Chris Offutt is a prize-winning short-story writer (Kentucky Straight), and in his tough, funny, sometimes brilliantly written first novel, he can't quite shake the habit. The Good Brother (Simon & Schuster; 317 pages; $23) could not be simpler or more direct in its narrative plan: a good man, Virgil Caudill, caught in a crushing predicament not of his making, commits a murder that seems unavoidable, abandons his home in the Kentucky hill country and survives precariously in Montana. The pages that narrate this contain no misdirection, no writerish word tasting, not even a flashback or shift in point of view, just fierce attention to the moment at hand. It is hard to see how Offutt's chapters could be more effective in the skill of their telling.

Yet the pieces of the novel don't really hang together. There are at least three such segments, almost distinct enough to be separate stories. The first is lazy, easy, short--no more than a dozen pages--an ear-perfect comedy routine of the ancient, comfortable insults that men use to get through a day of work. Virgil Caudill, in his early 30s, is laboring his way up to foreman on the Rocksalt, Ky., garbage-collecting crew. He and his pals jaw away at one another about an almighty hangover one of them has shown up with, about a flashy woman in a gaudy car, about a pup one of them is trying to sell: "I ain't sure that is a dog, boys. My opinion, that's a possum in a dog suit."

Virgil, seen here, is decent, ordinary and a bit slow. Not a good match, the reader feels, for the shrewd Virgil of the next section, who reluctantly accepts the stony verdict of his family and acquaintances, including the local sheriff, that he must kill the man who murdered his wild brother Boyd. The author does his impressive best to make this believable, writing a drunk scene in which Virgil sprawls on his back in the night woods and stares at the Milky Way. Virgil sobers up and, as efficiently as a spy-story villain, creates an elaborate false identity for himself, kills his man and drives off to Montana.

At which point the novel and hero again change character. Virgil falls among militia fanatics, whose bellicose posturing he watches without comprehension. As a Kentuckian, he understands a gun culture, but not the Westerners' devout hatred of the Federal Government. By now he is a wholly passive observer, as Offutt's narration heads off at right angles to itself, and the militia crazies prepare to end the tale in righteous fury. The author can't do for the Montana Aryans what he did for the Rocksalt garbage crew, which is to see them sympathetically, from the inside out. No one else has managed this, either. It's a writing job still to be done.

--By John Skow