All That Dishwashing Is Finally Paying Off For Novelist Tim Sandlin. By Jim Nintzel Social Blunders, by Tim Sandlin (Riverhead Books, 1997). Paper, $12. WHEN TIM SANDLIN was 9 years old, the children's magazine Jack and Jill published a poem he'd written. More than a quarter-century later, in 1986, he finally sold his first book, Sex and Sunsets. "I pretty much wrote every day between the two," says Sandlin, who will be in Tucson to read from his work on Thursday, April 10. "My first novel published was the fifth one I wrote. I wrote that when I was 30, so it took seven years to get it published." Today, about a decade after that first book, it seems the 46-year-old author is finally on the verge of the big time. His sixth book, Social Blunders, has just been released in paperback, and filmmakers are clamoring to bring several of his other works to the big screen. Social Blunders, which follows the romantic misadventures of 33-year-old Sam Callahan, is a darkly comic romp through heartache. When Sam's wife deserts him for the tattooed pool boy (and takes the Datsun 240Z and his prized baseball collection with her), he's forced to re-examine his roots--which are far more tangled than you might expect, because his mother Lydia has informed him he was conceived the night five high-school football players gang-raped her. Sam's quest to meet each of his fathers sets in motion a disastrous avalanche as his life spins raunchily out of control. A storyteller of the first degree, Sandlin combines a wry eye for detail with an understated voice to spin a tragic, crazy yarn that somehow makes you laugh out loud even as it breaks your heart. Hapless Sam Callahan is a reluctant protagonist cut from the same cloth as Danny Dent, hero of Larry McMurty's All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers--a book Sandlin readily admits is one of his all-time favorites. (McMurty, for his part, is one of Sandlin's biggest boosters.) Social Blunders is the third part of Sandlin's GroVont trilogy, which began with Skipped Parts and continued with Sorrow Floats. Each of the books, set a decade apart, trace the twisted lives of the clan Callahan, a family so intensely dysfunctional it would make an orphan grateful for abandonment. Sandlin's lean irony has earned him a wide range of admirers, from authors like McMurty and John Nichols to actress Drew Barrymore and musician Kim Gordon. After Gordon featured some of Sandlin's work on a Sonic Youth album, Sandlin got dubbed the "voice of grunge." "I guess I was always grungy, even before it was a movement," Sandlin says with a laugh. Grungy, indeed. Through the lean years following his graduation from a writing program at the University of Oklahoma, Sandlin moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and worked about 40 different jobs, with an emphasis on washing dishes. Through it all, he's been possessed by the urge to tell his stories. "It was either that or be an old dishwasher," he says. "There never was much career choice inbetween. I was always afraid that if I got a career I wouldn't write. I don't know if I would recommend it for other people. It may have been just dumb luck." Sandlin even seems skeptical of his own growing fame and success. "I'm on the edge of it, maybe, but I've been on the edge of it for five years," he says. "Nobody's actually sent any checks yet." But he has become successful enough to give up the dishwashing jobs. Other than his summer gig as a caretaker for a pair a rental cabins near his home in Jackson Hole, Sandlin is now working fulltime as a writer. Along with the fourth novel in the GroVont trilogy (from which he's likely to be reading when he visits Tucson next week), he's also working on a screenplay of Sex and Sunsets. Meanwhile, the film version of Skipped Parts begins production this summer. He says he hopes all the attention brings one thing: "I'm anxious to get the readers," he says. "That's the reason you do the movies--then people might read the book." Tim Sandlin will read from his work at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 10, at The Book Mark, 5001 E. Speedway. For more information, call 881-6350.

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