Notable

MESSENGERS OF GOD

by ELIE WIESEL 235 pages. Random House. $3.95.

The Jew, observes Elie Wiesel, "feels closer to the prophet Elijah than to his next-door neighbor." Analyzing like a good modern, revering like a good Jew, Wiesel portrays in these essays the majestic figures of the Old Testament rather as if he were writing a memoir about beloved but salty grandfathers and great-uncles from the East Side. Certainly Moses and Cain and Abel and even Adam seem as pungently real to him as the Jews he knew as a child in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In returning to the first Diaspora, the first murder, the first exile, Author Wiesel appears at last to have found a meaning, if not an excuse for the Holocaust he has borne witness to so brilliantly and compulsively in haunted books like One Generation After and in plays like Zalmen, or the Madness of God.

Approaching his Old Testament archetypes the way they approached God, more or less as equals--at least in matters of conversation--Wiesel does not hesitate to judge their characters. When push comes to shove (and it often does in the Old Testament), he tends to like his piety muscular. He goes so far as to prefer Esau to Jacob, referring to Jacob (as well as Adam) as "a weakling." What he interprets as Job's bland "resignation" to God he calls "an insult to man." Job, he remarks, "should have continued to protest."

Adam ("singularly uninteresting") and Joseph ("not too appealing a human being") bore and offend him during their palmy days. Only after Adam's expulsion from Eden, only after Joseph's imprisonment do they qualify for his term of respect: "a tragic figure." Happiness, he concludes, is more corrosive than misery. "Work," "strive," "suffer," "begin again" are the verbs of history and the concepts that inspire Wiesel. In the honorable survival of those who have believed, he finds the examples he needs in order to behave and survive today. Messengers of God, finally, is as simple and direct as that.

The search for relentless relevance can go occasionally rhetorical, as in talk about "man's eternal quest for meaning, justice and truth." It can also turn a little too retroactive. Thus Abraham is labeled "the first angry young man" and Isaac becomes "the first survivor." But much may be forgiven an author who can look Adam in the eye and say, "Poor man: punished for nothing. And he wasn't even Jewish."

THE SPECTATOR BIRD

by WALLACE STEGNER 214 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

"How to live and grow old inside a head I'm contemptuous of, in a culture I despise." The voice belongs to Joe Allston, a retired talent agent who serves as protagonist of Wallace Stegner's latest novel. But the problem is one that seems to have much preoccupied Stegner himself. Author of such celebrated books as Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, and for years a teacher at Stanford University, Stegner is only 67 and still active. But for some time his narrators have been older people (70 and upward). They mount the crow's-nest of age to look back (and down) on current civilization. The resulting au thor's voice is full of a distinctive sardonic ruefulness that produces a style of its own.

Joe Allston, for example, describes himself as "a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own." He is aching from rheumatoid arthritis but resents all treatment. "It irritates me to have people blowing out my gas line and testing my spark plugs and feeling all over me for loose wires." His wife Ruth worries about him, and keeps urging him to write "something, anything." So he begins "the way a kid lost in the mountains might holler at a cliff just to hear a voice."

What Allston writes is a recollection of a trip to Denmark made 20 years earlier. It is, as Stegner admits, a gothic tale complete with a brief interlude with Baroness Karen Blixen herself and a teasingly slow revelation of the sins of the Danish aristocracy. Allston, looking for his ancestral past, concludes that many things are rotten in the state of Denmark, and always have been, as they are in any place the human race inhabits.

Bittersweet Process. For a man like Joe Allston, who lives off other men's talents and is a failed talent himself, the book becomes a study on how to survive in a world where "most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus." The way of survival most celebrated here is the bittersweet process of an aging marriage. Allston muses in his closing coda: "The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and righting go on below." Wallace Stegner's message seems to be that, as in the ark, mankind and other animals go more gently into that good night if they go two by two.

A FINE ROMANCE

by CYNTHIA PROPPER SETON 192 pages. Norton. $7.95.

Readers who have an eye for danger signals will approach with extreme caution any novel that borrows its title from Cole Porter and its prose style from Henry James. But what wariness can possibly suffice if, in fact, the plot proves to deal with what surely must be the last of the Last Puritans from Boston, discovering during a bus trip with his family in decadent old Europe that he is a creature of passion as well as a man of reason? On top of Mount Etna and at the age of 53, yet!

Despite these ingredients of fictional disaster--plus a temptation to relate everything to "feminism"--A Fine Romance deserves a reading. Seton makes such charming, well-written excuses for her cliches: "There's an inherent plotlessness one has to contend with in the lives of civilized people, you see. Their marriages, divorces, are muted, cerebral. It puts a heavy burden on love affairs, do you see? They're the only credible climax left."

Will a reader, then, believe in salvation-by-adultery when proper Dr. Winters finally thaws with Alexia Reed, 35, who boasts "remarkable reddish-gold hair, green eyes, and a smacking style"? Hardly. But by then there's been a lot of lively conversation about Homer, Proust, Darwin and parenting, and Sicilian temples. Everybody talks just beautifully on Seton's bus. "The answer to the problem of alienation, to the difficulties of building a sense of community," she writes, "may be to put people on buses." It's not a bad way to keep an amiable but wobbling novel from going over a Sicilian cliff, either.

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