A Great Place to Die

Connolly's first novel sits two friends down at their favorite gathering place, the Black Dog Inn, outside of Pittsfield, Mass., and lets them talk. Charlie, who does nearly all the storytelling, takes Garth on a wide-ranging verbal journey centering on Bill, a hitchhiker Charlie picked up outside Springfield. Bill is tracking down his son, who was given up for adoption by his mother, an unstable artist now constructing a gigantic sculpture called Stonebird on a Tennessee mountaintop. Charlie and Bill team up and crisscross the Eastern seaboard, chasing the boy and his adoptive parents, encountering visionaries, lunatics and saints along the way. The prevailing tone is light and loopy, but Connolly's prose, comprised of trippy sentences that aim to add to the sense of onrushing adventure, can be annoying: ""It's all a pretense unless your every act is a passionate performance of what you know to be the true condition of our groveling defiance here on a speck of dust gone lush and swirling about in a sea of suns...""). The ending, too, disappoints, when it reveals that ""everybody is pregnant by everybody else and no one seems to care."" Many will find it too clever by half when it becomes clear that Garth and even the waitress know more about Charlie's saga than he does. (Mar.)