July 12, 1981

The Butcher Won a Wife

By RANDOLPH HOGAN

HOUSEHOLD SAINTS By Francine Prose.

rom the very first sentence of Francine Prose's fifth novel, you know you're under the spell of a first-rate storyteller: ''It happened by the grace of God that Joseph Santangelo won his wife in a card game.''

The time is the late 1940's, the place is Manhattan's Little Italy and the storyteller paints it vividly: ''The night that Joseph won his wife at pinochle was the final night of the feast of San Gennaro. But for the first time that anyone could remember, it was too hot to celebrate. All week, the cotton candy had refused to spin. Giant ice blocks melted into lukewarm puddles for the beer kegs. At the start of the feast, crowds gathered near the ferris wheel to see if its turning might stir up a breeze; but the rickety wheel revolved in slow motion, and up in the high cars children could be seen getting sick from swinging in the heat. One by one, the food stands closed for lack of business; among the first to go was the sausage concession run by Joseph Santangelo and his mother. And so it happened that Joseph was free to play cards.''

Joseph is a neighborhood butcher who weighs his thumb along with the sausage, tipping the scales: ''Like countless generations of Santangelos, Joseph never thought of himself as a dishonest butcher but rather as a leveler, an instrument of primitive justice like the legendary outlaws of the old country.'' Catherine Falconetti is the girl he wins at pinochle, a girl whose family has endured the withering gaze of the malocchio, or evil eye, for generations.

The heat is hellish enough to make men desperate: Catherine's father, three sheets to the wind and cursed with perennial bad luck, stakes his daughter against the chance for a blast from the North Pole -the meat locker in which Joseph keeps his sausage chilled.

After only a few pages, most of the elements of Miss Prose's modern-day legend are already in place: the grace of God, the feast day of a saint, the luck of the draw, the chance beginning of a marriage - and that sausage, which is strung through the entire novel. (One struggles, in vain, to remember another novel in which sausage plays a prominent role.)

One element is still to come. After the Santangelos' chance marriage turns into love, deepens and becomes a real marriage, Catherine finds she is pregnant. Joseph's mother, whose mysticism eventually blossoms into madness, asks him, ''How could you bring children into this world with that lousy Falconetti luck?'' The evil eye prevails. Catherine suffers a miscarriage. After a long, depressed convalescence in which Catherine loses her faith in God, spring comes, and with it renewal. Joseph's mother dies, and a child is born. Theresa is the perfect child, everything a parent could hope for: obedient, helpful, devoted, almost ... saintly.

She grows up modeling her life after St. Theresa, the Little Flower of Jesus: ''Theresa vowed to spend the rest of her life repenting and, like so many eight-year-old penitents, decided to begin with her homework. From that night on, she studied with the zeal of a fanatic. No medieval monk transcribing the Holy Writ could have taken his job more seriously. ... Meanwhile she asked herself: Is this enough? Is this enough? ... Though the priests could find no penance to assign her, they recognized that she was headed for trouble and warned her about scruples. Uncertain of ever finding the way, she could only keep on going, while praying for God to turn her in the right direction.''

At college, Theresa meets a boy and falls in love, and through him finds something larger than earthly love, a way of atoning for her life by doing menial household chores, ironing her way to the grace of God - and madness.

Like all fine novels, ''Household Saints'' is an equation, everything held in delicate balance until the pieces fall into place with the certainty of algebra. And like all fine novelists, Miss Prose concerns herself with the elemental: randomness and predestination; good luck and bad; cheating and being cheated; God's will and man's will; sainthood and sin; madness; patterns weaving their way through generations.

''Twenty years ago, I won my wife in a card game,'' Joseph says near the end of the novel, ''and now our crazy daughter is playing pinochle with God.''

''Take it easy,'' Catherine tells him, ''It's not your fault. No one ever went crazy because her father won her mother in a pinochle game.''

''I'm not saying it's my fault,'' Joseph replies, ''Far from it. I'm saying there's a pattern.'' It's hard to convey the richness and the engaging complexity of this deceptively simple novel, to provide some idea of its wisdom and humor, and to tell you that its appeal is by no means special - it deserves the widest possible audience. Francine Prose is a splendid writer.

Randolph Hogan is a member of the cultural news staff of The New York Times.

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