BOOK REVIEW : Comic Tour Falls Short of Tour de Force : COOLER BY THE LAKE:<i> by Larry Heinemann</i> ; Farrar Straus Giroux $20; 242 pages

Hardee-har-har is, to begin with, hard. Madcap is the most painstakingly arranged of headgear. Rollicking requires advance planning. Comedy, in short, is not simply what a serious writer does to relax.

Larry Heinemann, who wrote “Paco’s Story,” a painful and profoundly imagined novel about a Vietnam war veteran, takes the day off in “Cooler by the Lake.” It is the broadest of whimsies about a picaresque working-class family in Chicago. To call it self-indulgent is an understatement; it has the approximate relation to humor that singing in the shower has to singing.

Its central character is Maximilian Nutmeg. He lives in a ramshackle house by the railroad tracks with, or in the frequent company of, his wife Muriel, a host of cats, and a heap of relatives; among them, Belle Noche, Amaryllis and Sweet William. His story will involve a strung-out and complicated encounter with Loretta Spokeshave, a rich woman, and Jean Claude Bouillon, her incredibly rich lover.

By their names you shall know them, or at least, the fictional world they hop around. It is a world where comic eccentricity is heaped upon comic eccentricity; and it is narrated by a voice that belongs to none of the characters, and that doesn’t seem to belong to Heinemann either. The voice operates like the sidemen in television comedy shows who encourage the studio audience with signs reading “Laugh” and “Are We Having Fun?”

Max, who does various mildly dishonest things to keep afloat, awakens one morning with a new scheme. It requires assembling the best possible wardrobe from his collection of secondhand odds and ends. (“Decisions, decisions,” we read, as Max makes his choices; clearly, that’s the sideman’s voice, not his.)

He hollers for Muriel; the sound dislodges swarms of cats. Muriel, who after 30 years of marriage, is still incredibly obliging--she cooks, dusts, scrubs, gives sensible advice, fetches Max iced beers while he steams in the tub, and is fabulously sexy--trots upstairs and ties his bow-tie.

All dressed, and carrying a gasoline can, Max sets out to panhandle downtown Chicago. He is variously a salesman late for a meeting, a lawyer late for a conference, a wedding guest late for a ceremony. His car has stalled on an empty tank, he’s left his wallet at home, he needs a few dollars.

It goes beautifully for a day or two; then he picks up a wallet containing eight $100 bills and the credit cards of Ms. Spokeshave, who lives in a posh Chicago suburb. The story goes on to tell how he tries to return it to her, after a serious battle between conscience and temptation, with Muriel as referee; of the adventures and misadventures along the way; and how, at the end, Loretta and Jean Claude richly reward the entire Nutmeg clan.

The story, however--which has its points, apart from an ending so far-fetched that it never does make it back--is only faintly and sporadically in evidence. Heinemann has written his book almost entirely out of digressions.

It takes Max, for instance, some 30 pages to get out of the house. First, we read all kinds of details about his habits, his tastes, and his industrially quaint relatives. His mother, for example, sits on the porch in an automobile seat, drinking gin and gazing at the tracks down which her pension arrived. Her husband, who worked for the railroad, was killed by a train.

When Max takes the El downtown, we get the rambling conversations of two “little old ladies”--Heinemann likes the phrase and uses it again--something about the various passengers who get on and off, and the kind of day the conductor had. Later, there are 12 pages about his brief stint as a bus driver. It names the streets his bus passed by, the origins of each street name, and something about the people they were named after.

When Max picks up Ms. Spokeshave’s wallet, we read a page about Philadelphia’s Independence Hall--on one side of the $100-bill--and another about the womanizing of Benjamin Franklin--on the other. There are four pages devoted to the plots of his uneasy dreams about money. There are all kinds of digressions about the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, Chicago politicians, Chicago watering spots.

Heinemann may intend a richly comic panorama of Chicago life; a light takeoff, perhaps, on Leopold Bloom’s Dublin meanderings. What we get is a fairly inert panorama of facts, city lore and bar talk. It suggests warmed-over Mike Royko or Herb Caen, stretched from column to book length. In following Max Nutmeg through Chicago, Heinemann cannot pass a single side street without turning down it. They are all very much the same.

Next: Chris Goodrich reviews “Trick or Treat” by Lesley Glaister (Atheneum).