Lacrimae Rerum

By LANCE MORROW

PREPARATIONS FOR THE ASCENT by Gilbert Rogin

Random House; 181 pages; $8.95

Albert is forever coaxing the world to yield up more elegant significances, secretly glowing metaphysics. He goes for a tangerine at night: "Opening the refrigerator he is dazzled by the burst of light, finding it comparable to the effulgence which in the Rembrandt print reveals the stirring Lazarus, floods Christ's robes. In that case, the light presumably emanates from the Lord instead of coming from behind the No-Cal cream soda, but the principle is the same." Albert peers into a dryer at the Laundromat: "Behind the glass door, clothes appear and reappear, seemingly striving with death-defying leaps to reach an unattainable objective: to be something more exalted than garments, Albert guesses."

But in the claustrophobic tumble of his brain, the world has a habit of collapsing into melancholy. Poor overread Albert warns himself about Keats' "egotistical sublime." His rich interior is forever ababble with Kant and Schopenhauer and his own obsessive, bewildered mutterings. A distant descendant of Leopold Bloom, cousin to the anguished intellectual comics of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and even Woody Allen, Albert negotiates a shambling, rueful passage through his mid-40s. He has made Who's Who in America (a New York magazine writer and editor), but "lately he has the feeling that he is not so much pursuing his destiny as furiously racing alongside it, the way cars race trains in old movies." He noodles the lacrimae rerum note. He studies life from a perspective of witty but vaguely narcissistic woe.

Novelist Rogin is the managing editor of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, a magazine in which bright, brisk conflicts get resolved by the end of the fourth quarter. Albert's world is more bewildering, achingly inconclusive. He lives in a Greenwich Village brownstone, two flights up from lis "semi-ex-wife" Violet, who has resumed life with her first husband, a functioning dipso poet named Skippy Mountjoy. Albert drops by to walk their dachshund every day. His girlfriend is a youthful, frantically athletic woman whom he calls the Human Dynamo. She telephones lim at night from New Canaan, Conn., to wonder whether the vanity plates on her new BMW should say YOGURT or SUNDAE or MUFFIN. Stooped by his literacy and sorrow, Albert must listen to the Dynamo complain: "You don't play tennis, you don't snow-ski, you don't water-ski . . . Albert, we have nothing in common." The Dynamo later lets fly with some of her generation's ultimate obloquy: "You're so out of touch with your own feelings." Albert tries to unload some of his burdens upon his psychiatrist, a lulu named Nederlander ("I'm turning the wheel over to you, Doc"), but the best ad vice the shrink can offer is, "Tonight, eat Chinese."

Rogin has arranged his novel as a dis orderly meditation wandering over six years of Albert's life. Tragedy (his step son's death by drowning) blows by with a sort of offhanded inevitability. The Dynamo moves from New Canaan to Fair Haven. But the action is entirely within the well-furnished brain of antic and sorrowing Albert. One day he tells his psychiatrist: "You know, Tolstoy said that playing the accordion diverts men from realizing the falsity of their goals." Replies Dr. Nederlander: "You want me to turn on the Yankee game?"

Albert would be a solipsistically in ward character, mildly insufferable, if it were not for the extraordinary grace and intelligence of Rogin's prose, which some times accomplishes small, splendid feats of magic. At one point he warns the reader: "What follows is tender and complicated." Exactly.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.