The Funnel of Love : TORNADO ALLEY <i> by Craig Nova (Delacorte Press: $18.95; 408 pp.) </i>

Marie Boule, a pivotal character in Craig Nova’s “Tornado Alley,” describes herself early on in the novel as a “small-town girl who is almost dangerous with frustration.” An only child, Marie lives with her parents in Baxter, Penn., a spiritually and culturally barren resort area for fishing and hunting. Together they run “Al Boule’s Hilltop Store,” specializing in “Guns, Food, Worms and Night Crawlers.”

Marie’s first-person narration chronicles her coming of age and recounts her father’s relentless and pathetic attempts to become a great man like his heroes Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford: “I was thinking this afternoon about Henry Ford . . . . It wasn’t such a large thing that got him started. He wasn’t a genius. He had just one small idea. One.” Al Boule fairly brims with small ideas. The first of these is to give customers a free cup of coffee and a stale doughnut, both of which most people dump into a gully at the bottom of the hill.

Marie spends much of her adolescence and early adulthood playing handmaiden to her father’s dreams, abetting his sorry, sad schemes until the day he dies of bone marrow cancer. Soon after her father’s cremation Marie leaves Baxter, taking with her, among other things, a .357 Magnum pistol, a box of ammunition, and a canister containing her father’s ashes. Aboard the bus, a stranger asks Marie her name and she replies, “Christine Taylor. That’s a name you could fall in love with, isn’t it?”

Book II (the novel comprises five “books”) is set in Marlowe, (Northern) Calif., in the 1960s and is narrated by Tubby Mars, proprietor of Marlowe’s pool hall. He tells the story of Ben Lunn, a teen-ager who has gained the respect of his elders for his quiet ways and his uncanny ability to predict the weather, an ability that, in the days before weather satellites and high-tech prognostication, marks Ben as an exceptional being among the ordinary folks of Marlowe. The culmination of his amateur weather forecasting comes when he accurately predicts a tornado for Marlowe, a place where tornadoes are rare.

Ben goes on to study meteorology at Berkeley and eventually attains his Ph.D. He accepts a short-term assignment with the National Atmospheric Project, pursuing tornadoes in Oklahoma’s tornado alley. This episode, though it takes up a mere three pages, conveniently provides Nova with his title and a grand metaphor as well. Tornado alley represents that terra incognita, the human heart. Nova equates our emotions (especially those involving love) to violent, unpredictable funnels of destruction. The terrain upon which these twisting funnels of love interact is tornado alley.

Ben may be able to foresee changes in the weather but he doesn’t seem to be able to anticipate when love and the potentially destructive emotions that go with it are about to sweep him up in their fury. When, as a married, 40-year-old father of two, he finally meets 25-year-old Marie Boule (now Christine Taylor, living in San Francisco and self-employed as a high-priced call girl), he embarks on a reckless love affair but doesn’t sense the danger and desperation in Marie until it is too late.

The mistake that both Marie and Ben make is to think of love as an antidote for their insidious dissatisfaction. Marie watches old films on TV, films starring “William Powell or Cary Grant or one of those men who knew how to make a woman laugh,” and wonders whether that world actually exists somewhere. She decides it must and is determined to find it. Ben, at one point in the story, says of love: “Life would be pretty grim without it.” Yes, but when love is used to dispel life’s grimness and is not simply reveled in for the intrinsic joy it offers, it becomes a destructive force of its own.

What prevents this story of sad, desperate people from being simply dispiriting is the author’s considerable writing talent and his great love and empathy for his characters. These people are not the cardboard cutouts of a third-rate novelist. Nova employs four narrators--Marie, Tubby, Ben and Ben’s wife, Faith--each with a voice and point of view distinct from the others. Nova delivers a prose that is completely appropriate to the verbal skills of an ordinary person and yet at the same time lyrical, subtle, almost poetic, a prose that makes his characters’ emotional lives palpable, a prose that makes a sad story pleasurable to read.