BOOKS

By Paul Gray

SCUM by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 218 pages; $19.95). The title sounds right for a new Elmore Leonard detective novel, but Singer has extracted it from a passage in his own short story The Death of Methuselah: "Flesh and corruption were the same from the very beginning, and always will remain the scum of creation, the very opposite of God's wisdom, mercy and splendor."

From this rather glum moral, the 1978 Nobel laureate spins a lively, hectic tale. Singer's language, as translated from the Yiddish by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz, retains its astonishing speed and vigor, an economy of storytelling technique scarcely matched in this century. The year is 1906, and Max Barabander, saddened by the death of his adolescent son and the consequent coldness of his wife Rochelle, leaves Buenos Aires, where he has made a good living selling "houses and lots," to return to his native Poland "to perpetrate," he says, "he knew not what."

Sex has a lot to do with it; Max has been rendered impotent by his troubles. In Warsaw, particularly on Krochmalna Street, he quickly encounters a number of women as eager to use him as he is them, with generally unhappy results. There is, as Singer warns, little of God's wisdom and mercy in this book, but the display of human perversity and sheer cussedness is enthralling.

THE MACGUFFIN by Stanley Elkin (Simon & Schuster; 283 pages; $19.95). Bobbo Druff, 58, is a washed-up pol serving time as city commissioner of streets in a minor-league U.S. metropolis. His wife of 36 years is going deaf; his son Mikey, 30, still lives at home; and his health -- after a heart bypass, four instances of a collapsed lung and extensive circulatory problems in his legs -- is not robust. Understandably he concludes that the "world is getting away from me, I think."

So he invents a MacGuffin, the term Alfred Hitchcock used to describe anything that gives spurious meaning to a plot, or, as Bobbo explains, "whatever got slipped into Cary Grant's pocket without his knowledge or that Jimmy Stewart picked up by mistake when the girl switched briefcases on him." The MacGuffin that Bobbo comes up with is a conspiracy to get rid of him that involves everyone from his bosses to his son's deceased Lebanese girlfriend to his limousine drivers.

Within 48 hours or so, Elkin puts his hero through permutations of paranoia. No matter how his language prattles, jokes, howls, sings, the commissioner cannot quite divert himself from the knowledge that "life goes on." Whatever his other failings, Bobbo, like the best of Elkin's past characters, triumphs in the end as a world-class monologist.

FATHER MELANCHOLY'S DAUGHTER by Gail Godwin (Morrow; 404 pages; $21.95). Margaret Gower is six on the day (Sept. 13, 1972) she comes home from school to learn that her mother has abandoned her and her father Walter, the rector of St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church in the small Virginia town of Romulus. The mother has gone away with Madelyn Farley, a college friend who spends a night with the Gowers on her way back from a summer-theater job (she is a set designer) to her home in New York City. The bereaved daughter and her father, who periodically vanishes behind the "Black Curtain" of depression, rehash this brief visit incessantly, looking for clues to explain the calamity that has changed their lives. Margaret remembers Madelyn's saying, "Lovely is the art of pleasing others. Art is about pleasing yourself."

Margaret's long, leisurely narration, which takes her up to age 22, constitutes a test of this assertion. In the end she chooses good manners, in the old-fashioned sense, over assertiveness, generosity over self-absorption. Grace, both divine and human, seems worth preserving. Those who encourage Gail Godwin to include more nastiness, more hard-edged portraits of evil in her novels, have missed the point that this one, her eighth, makes again: it can be just as heroic, and as aesthetically rewarding, to be nice as it is to be horrid.

CHICAGO LOOP by Paul Theroux (Random House; 196 pages; $20). With a lot more gore and a lot less talent, this novel could have shared some of the uproar that has descended on Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Here is a wealthy, morally rudderless white male stalking through a city, in this case Chicago, looking for trouble. Parker Jagoda, a successful real estate developer, has a child in the northern suburb of Evanston and a sleek, sophisticated wife who works as a professional model and periodically arranges to meet him in hotels for ritualized bouts of fantasy sex. Still, Parker wants more. He puts personal ads in local papers, and bears an odd grudge against the women who respond. One night, during one of these assignations, he does something so horrible that he cannot bear to remember it.

But headlines and TV bulletins about a "Wolfman" on the prowl eventually force Parker to face what he has committed. There is some macabre humor in this recognition; understanding that he is in fact a carnivore, the former health-food addict starts gorging on junk. But somewhere around this point, Theroux begins a tour de force portrait of character disintegration, meticulously detailed and utterly convincing. A clearer sense of who Parker was before he fell apart might have made Chicago Loop a clearer, more uplifting admonitory tale; the scariest possibility is that the anti-hero was no one at all until he found his fate, and his destination, through violence.

WAR FEVER by J.G. Ballard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182 pages; $18.95). Although he became known as a writer of science fiction, that term has never adequately defined J.G. Ballard, whose works include Empire of the Sun (1984), an autobiographical novel (he was born in Shanghai in 1930, to British parents) of childhood in a Japanese-occupied region of China. This new collection of 14 stories reinforces the impression that the author neither should nor can be categorized.

True, a number of these tales unwind in the future, although science has little to do with most of them. The title story portrays Beirut some 30 years hence, still the scene of senseless, sectarian slaughter. A weary soldier conceives a plan for peace that actually begins to work, until it is sabotaged by the United Nations forces assigned to referee the carnage. The reason why is the extremely incisive point of the whole exercise. In The Largest Theme Park in the World, Ballard looks ahead past the planned 1992 economic unification of Europe to 1995, when many of the Continent's citizens decide to extend their Mediterranean summer vacations year-round.

What then? That is the disruptive inquiry hovering over all these stories. Ronald Reagan back in the White House in 1992? A man who claims to have been an astronaut, even though it is clear he is lying? As he has been doing for some 30 years, Ballard turns odd questions into inspired narratives.

DAMAGE by Josephine Hart (Knopf; 198 pages; $18). Erotic obsession is a risky subject for fiction. No matter how besotted the victims of this malady may be, their behavior is likely to strike mere witnesses, i.e., readers, as distasteful, hilarious or both. This first novel, whose author is a London theatrical producer and the wife of advertising mogul Maurice Saatchi, sidesteps such unintended responses, thanks to old-fashioned British reserve.

The unnamed male narrator comes by his stiff upper lip naturally. In his early 50s, he has been a successful physician, and is now a Tory M.P. on the way up. He has a beautiful wife, two talented children; he has, he confesses, "never faced a serious moral dilemma." Then he meets Anna Barton, his son Martyn's new girlfriend: "Just for a moment I had met my sort, another of my species." So has she, evidently, because before long the two are tearing at each other's clothes on a floor in Anna's London house.

"Of her body I have little to say," he notes; later, faced with a ghastly consequence of his behavior, he responds, "I will not speak of this." The understatement works wonders. This disastrous affair comes trailing some of the cliches of romantic fiction: kinky sex, a wineglass snapped between clenched fingers. But Damage, through its fastidious language, restores these tired old tropes to the realm of flesh and blood.