A Diary of Pains

COAT UPON A STICK (254 pp.)--Norman Fruchter--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

There was a time in literature when men aged gracefully and died benevolently. Now the old men of fiction are always difficult, as if they had all taken Dylan Thomas' advice: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." The hero of this novel rages even more than most. The novel covers only one day in his life, but its ferocity is enough for generations. Though old age is a curious subject for a first novel, Norman Fruchter, 25, writes with the accumulated wisdom of a nonagenarian.

The old immigrant Jew lives in a shabby single room on Manhattan's East Side. He quarrels with all forms of life: pigeons, cats, dogs, landlord, goyim. He hates them all because they still have their life, while he is soon to die. He treats no one worse than his son Carl, who fled to the suburbs and keeps a house that is not strictly kosher. The old man knows how to make him feel guilty. "You think I keep a diary of all my aches and pains, so I can tell you about them every two months?" he grumbles when Carl asks about his health. "I'd need a whole Torah to write them all down."

The old man is the caretaker of the local synagogue, but he is no sooner out of the synagogue than he is off to steal food from the supermarket. His adventure has all the suspense of Hannibal crossing the Alps. First he jauntily cases the store, pocketing a contest blank: ''Why I like Queen Mist Tuna, in 25 words or less. Maybe I should tell them. Maybe I should write them how to steal from a supermarket. In 25 words." He thrusts some items into his oversized jacket. But a box of crackers is too large and causes a bulge. He is terrified that he will be spotted. The clerk looms larger than Cyclops. Trembling and stuttering, the old man slinks out, paying only for some cough drops. Once outside, he laughs contemptuously at the "stupid schwartzes'' who let him escape.

The old man is haunted by visions of people he has cheated in his life. At times they sprawl all over his room, tormenting him so much he spills his soup and screams in agony. In the afternoon, when he is feeling almost amiable, he tosses some bread crumbs to a sickly pigeon. He runs out of crumbs, but the pigeon continues to stare at him with a baleful red eye. ''If I look at it long enough it will go away,'' the old man thinks. The pigeon pecks at his shoe. "Go away," the old man cries, kicking the pigeon in the throat; and it promptly keels over. That night the pigeon joins the other ghosts in the old man's room.

For all his bitterness, the old man wrests a kind of gallows humor from his life. Noting a hole in his wool sweater, he mutters: "So have a good meal, moths. Soon I'll be dead. You'll have the whole sweater to yourselves. And my suit, too. Not that I think it's worth eating. But then I wouldn't know. I'm not a moth." A reader is torn between exasperation and pity. It is a measure of Fruchter's skill that he can make the old man so grotesque and at the same time so sympathetic.

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