Cheap Ticket to Heaven

Novelist Smith (Canaan) is a dazzlingly lyrical prose stylist; perhaps because he is a poet as well, he can render beauty from even the most mundane description. But his considerable gifts are not enough to save this bloated story that romanticizes but never quite makes credible a notion of glamorous, all-American criminality--seen recently in such movies as Natural Born Killers and True Romance (from which Cheap Ticket seems to borrow too heavily). Jack Baker and his wife, Clare Manigault--young, intelligent, beautiful and deadly--go on a crime and killing spree from the Midwest to the Deep South. Thanks to troubled family histories, they are both ""natural"" criminals, given to moments of self-loathing but not many of regret. As the novel opens, they are holding up a bank; Jack is caught soon after and jailed. There he shares a cell with Clare's thug of a father, Francis, who tells Jack a grim story of how his son, Will, tortured to death his other son, James, for sleeping with Will's wife. Frank orders Jack to kill Will; Jack then breaks out of prison with the help of Clare. During their on-the-road criminal adventures, they first try to find Will, who is working for a lowlife called Donnie Bee, and whom they decide not to kill after all; get followed by a journalist who wants to tell their story to the world; steal a vest filled with gold from an old colleague; and then become the targets of Donnie Bee and Will, who want the gold. The weakness of the novel isn't the plot, which moves swiftly and logically enough; rather it is Smith's continuous attempts to render Jack and Clare in larger-than-life terms. Long, languorous passages are devoted to their ""interiority""--their hopes, worries, soft-focused memories; but such sections sentimentalize these characters, as if Smith wants them to appear as some kind of existentially heroic poets of violence. But this results in some unintentionally hilarious dialogue and, overall, in a crime-spree novel that short-changes excitement for melodramatic meaning. (Aug.)