Gates of Eden

The title may refer to Eden, but the characters in Coen's first collection of stories seem to come from anyplace but. The writing half of the acclaimed filmmaking duo (brother Joel directs) peoples his work with such wonderfully unsympathetic leads as a bumbling hit man, in ""Johnny Ga-Botz,"" who gets himself exiled to Barbados, and a boy who terrorizes his Hebrew school, in ""The Old Country."" But it's not the comic villains so much as the absurdly petty types who give these 14 stories their color--men like Weights and Measures inspector Joe Gendreau, who, in the title story, walks around pondering such imponderables as ""what kind of society has ours become, when one kind of lettuce is no longer enough,"" and tries to bust men ""who laugh at standards."" For all the small-minded selfishness of Coenland residents, the characters never stop being pitiful--and thus never lose their comic edge. We know that Hector Berlioz, Private Investigator (the eponymous character in one of two stories told entirely in dialogue), will not solve a real crime, but the hilarious non sequiturs he and his suspects engage in make them entirely appealing. Anyone familiar with Coen's films will instantly recognize his two-bit hustlers, and those well-versed in American-Jewish literature will easily identify the immigrant depictions. But many readers will find that familiarity is no obstacle to the enjoyment of this wittily absurd debut. Editor, Colin Dickerman; agent, Anthony Gardner Agency. (Nov.)