Copyright 1991 The Washington Post The Washington Post April 5, 1991, Friday, Final Edition SECTION: STYLE; PAGE B3 LENGTH: 754 words HEADLINE: Book World; The Bass Years of Their Lives SERIES: Occasional BYLINE: Douglas Seibold BODY: HOT WATER By Don Wallace Soho. 292 pp. $ 18.95 read review

The Coca-Cola bottling plant is the biggest employer in tiny Valhalla, Miss., a slow-moving place where Coke, in the words of one character, is "next to Jesus." Chief bottler Gar Foote, the hero and narrator of "Hot Water," is a man of standing in the local community. As Gar tells it, he loves his product and his company. He also loves his spitfire wife, Virginia Roy, a woman of such formidable parts that she's always referred to by her full, maiden name. But Gar's first love is bass fishing, which he pursues with the single-minded ardor of a man obsessed.

Far more than mere recreation, to Gar "bassin' " is a vocation of sorts; it's all he really wants to do with his free time. It can also, in this age of made-for-cable fishing tournaments, be a most lucrative enterprise. Today's competitive fishing bears little resemblance to the peaceful pastime of yore. Top bassologists use 70-mph boats, state-of-the-art electronics technology and a near-infinite variety of artificial lures and chemical attractants in stalking their piscine prey. Roll over, Izaak Walton.

Virginia Roy can understand her husband's passion for bassin', though she doesn't share it herself. She's entirely devoted to her own pastime: mock combat games fought with splatter guns and paint-ball bullets. V.R.'s a crack shot, cool under fire and proficient in hand-to-hand combat, and she finds plotting guerrilla actions a lot more satisfying than her job as a secretary.

Gar's story opens sometime in the recent past, just as he's about to make the jump back into tournament fishing. He'd left the sport in disgrace seven years before, back in its infancy, following a murky incident in which his ne'er-do-well promoter, best friend and brother-in-law, Jerry Roy, absconded to Costa Rica with a hefty piece of prize money. Now Gar and his three best fishing buddies have banded together to form the Bass Commandos, dedicating themselves to an all-out assault on the bastions of competitive bassin'.

But a series of complications ensues that fouls their well-laid plans. Two shady developers approach Gar with an offer to make him Valhalla's next mayor. He's intrigued, but distracted by the abrupt missives he's been receiving from Coke headquarters in Atlanta that suggest the inconceivable: Coke is planning to change its age-old formula. He refuses to believe it, but when New Coke is unveiled, Gar is forced to cope with the worst sort of corporate ignominy.

Meanwhile, Virginia Roy falls under the influence of Rico Octoponte, a mysterious fund-raiser for Latin American anti-communists, who's pressing her and her fellow weekend warriors to make ever deeper commitments to the cause. Finally, the scapegrace Jerry Roy returns from exile, bringing with him a plan he's conceived to turn Gar's Bass Commandos into the hottest commercial property in tournament fishing. What bassin' is to Gar and war play to V.R., hustling is to Jerry. Burned once, and badly, Gar tries to resist Jerry's scheme, but, inevitably, he succumbs.

As first-time novelist Don Wallace posits it, the great American pastime Gar and V.R. must reckon with is not fishing or war, whether fake or real, but selling. Gar believes in uninhibited American commerce, but the differences between selling, selling out and being sold -- in a world where even such eternal verities as the formula for Coca-Cola are no longer held sacred and blood ties are worth about as much as hucksters like his brother-in-law think they can get for them -- are what he discovers in the recounting of his antic story.

Wallace plays each of his plot lines with authoritative skill, working them for all the comedy they're worth. "Hot Water" does get a little snarled and murky, however, when the scene shifts from Valhalla to Las Vegas as the story nears its conclusion. There the Bass Commandos take part in a monster bass tourney on Lake Mead (another Jerry Roy production) that's being held over the same weekend as a giant Soldier of Fortune convention, where V.R. and Rico aim to make their big strike. But his exploitation of the inflated idiom of competitive fishing is very funny, and he does a terrific job of inhabiting the mind of Gar Foote, a man for whom the struggle between fish sense and fish science is near the center of life's mysteries. "Hot Water" is an entertaining digression on a few of the newer varieties of good-old, down-home American lunacy.

The reviewer is a freelance writer and critic.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, AUTHOR DON WALLACE