New Canadian Blues

THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY (293 pp.) --Brian Moore--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($4).

James Francis ("Ginger") Coffey has discovered the secret of eternal boyhood. He never faces facts. Born in Dublin "in humble circs" but now a status-seeking New Canadian immigrant, Ginger daily imagines his ship will come in even while he founders at some bar. With a flaming red mustache and a bluff military stance acquired in the Irish Army, Ginger leads his troupes of sentimental illusions and heroic reveries straight into the machine-gun fire of reality.

Old Maids & Galley Slaves. Belfast-born Canadian Novelist Brian Moore, 38, knows Ginger well; his literary career has been devoted to lives that would be sorry farces if they were not sadder truths. Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne worried an old maid's wasted years in cruel whispers. In The Feast of Lupercal, he basted a 37-year-old virgin schoolmaster who knew less of sex than his students. While its plot is more forced than forceful, The Luck of Ginger Coffey dyes its boy-man hero in the rich Moore pigments of humor, poignance and irony.

As a New Canadian, Ginger Coffey is a swiftly self-unmade man. Jobless, he spends the $600 his wife Veronica had set aside for return passage to Ireland. When he finally confesses this, Veronica sobs, slams and locks the bedroom door and leaves Ginger to warm his imagination on two quarts of beer. Armed with false courage and the recommendations of a cartoonist friend named Gerry Grosvenor, Ginger applies to the Montreal Tribune to become a Gentleman of the Press. But brrrr-tongued Managing Editor MacGregor, nicknamed Hitler by his staff, believes in starting everyone at the bottom, proofreading the galleys. On his night-shift "galley-slave" wages, Ginger cannot actually support his wife and teen-age daughter. To his disgust, Veronica gets a millinery job; to his shock, she leaves him.

Desperate to eke out his income, Ginger enlists as a driver for a diaper service called Tiny Ones. He dons a battle jacket, military cap, sky-blue trousers and knee-length rubber boots, but the uniform of the diaper corps is not enough camouflage. Some home-town Dubliners spot him on his route and gleefully fire off letters to the old country reporting the comeuppance of proud Ginger Coffey.

Hailstones from Home. Meanwhile Gerry Grosvenor has become the other man in Veronica's life, and Ginger tortures himself with erotic fantasies of the pair's love life. Husband and wife are reunited in an episode bordering on burlesque. Answering a call of nature in the entranceway of a fashionable hotel, a boozed-up Ginger is booked for "indecent exposure." Then, in a dankly contemplative mood in his overnight cell, Ginger finally grows up: "A man's life was nobody's fault but his own."

Words drop on Novelist Moore's pages with the errant grace and purity of snowflakes, and occasionally an epigrammatic hailstone comes rattling down on the author's adopted homeland, e.g., "Money is the Canadian way to immortality," "Canada is a bore." But in the end, Ginger Coffey refutes both charges.

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