By HAL ESPEN
March 30, 1997
onald Antrim likes his comedy pitch-black. In his first novel, ''Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World,'' a pleasant suburban town becomes a hellish war zone in which neighbor dispatches neighbor with Stinger missiles, and the psychotic narrator, good old Mr. Robinson, presides over the basement torture and murder of a little girl. Now, in ''The Hundred Brothers,'' the second volume in what is shaping up to be a very nasty projected trilogy, the 38-year-old Mr. Antrim has staged the testosterone-poisoned reunion of a cruel and debauched fraternal cohort whose sibling society would make Robert Bly weep with shame. Yes, there really are 100 brothers -- white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American men of the usual upper-middle-class professions. For mythic and satiric purposes, Mr. Antrim has concocted a fantastically large brood whose prodigious father is dead but still uninterred, and the brothers have gathered in the vast red library of their leaky ancestral home for the ostensible purpose of finding and burying the urn containing the old man's ashes.
