Victims Of Contemporary Life MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK by Saul Bellow; Morrow; 335 pages; $17.95

By Paul Gray

Although he hardly wants for honors (three National Book Awards, the Nobel Prize for Literature), Saul Bellow has not always been appreciated for his comic gifts. That may be because his books and reputation can appear so intimidating. When a serious, renowned writer tosses out big ideas, the proper response seems to be a hushed, respectful concentration. But at least as far back as Herzog (1964), Bellow began putting the act of thinking through some antic paces. Moses Herzog was the first, but not the last, of the author's heroes to suffer the risible torments of the hypereducated man. Notable among these is the discovery that life in 20th century America has a few tricks up | its sleeve that are not covered by the grand panoply of Western culture. It is possible, in such cases, to know nearly everything and nothing at all.

Despite its cheerless title, More Die of Heartbreak is a consistently funny variation on the theme of intellectual haplessness. Its narrator, Kenneth Trachtenberg, 35, is an assistant professor of Russian literature at a university in an unnamed "Rustbelt metropolis" in the Midwest. Raised in Paris by expatriate American parents, Kenneth has come back to the U.S. to be near his maternal uncle Benn Crader, a man in his 50s and an eminent botanist, revered by fellow specialists for his work on Arctic lichens. Kenneth's obsession with Benn stems from a conviction that "you have no reason to exist unless you believe you can make your life a turning point. A turning point for everybody -- for humankind." The nephew feels his uncle has single-mindedly pursued such a path and might be an appropriate guide: "I thought, Would it be possible to bring to the human world what Uncle brought to plant life?" Unfortunately, this "crucial project" is interrupted by a bit of mundane melodrama. After 15 years as a widower, Benn marries the young, beautiful Matilda Layamon, only child of a wealthy, well-connected physician.

Hoping to record a collaboration that would lead to a revolution in human thought, Kenneth is stuck instead with a farce out of Balzac. Benn's wife and in-laws have plans for him. Matilda can hardly be supported as is her wont on her husband's salary of $60,000. But Benn has assets he has absentmindedly forgotten: an uncle of his, a notable crook in the disintegrating local Democratic machine, once bilked him and Kenneth's mother out of huge proceeds from the sale of family property. Dr. Layamon tells Benn man to man: "Well, as you will have figured, with a brain like yours, the object is to recover money from Uncle Harold. That's the overall game plan." From the sidelines, Kenneth comments bitterly, "Basically, he didn't even want what they wanted -- the money. As many dollar bills as it would take to fill the Grand Canyon wouldn't have been enough for them. Plant morphology satisfied him. So how were they to understand one another?"

Benn's story, that of a comfortably aging man pulled into the muck of life by an avid and avaricious young wife, was hilarious when Chaucer included it in The Canterbury Tales, and it still seems none the worse for wear. Bellow's contribution to this hoary tale lies in Kenneth's fumbling, long-winded ^ attempts to get it told. "I take very little pleasure in theories," he announces at the beginning, "and I'm not going to dump ideas on you." After incessant theorizing and idea dumping, he confesses toward the end, "As is evident by now, I have a weakness for the big issues."

These include his "East-West ideas," specifically the notion that the free-for-all liberation of modern democracies produces pain equally as noble and significant as that brought about by repressions in the Soviet bloc: "The sufferings of freedom also had to be considered. Otherwise we would be conceding a higher standard to totalitarianism, saying that only oppression could keep us honest." And Uncle Benn, a "sex-abused man," is not the only victim of contemporary life that Kenneth has in mind. "All this may appear to be about me," he disclaims at one point about his narrative, but much of it is. Kenneth too has a grievance. The woman with whom he had a daughter refused to marry him and moved to Seattle, where she now consorts with a burly ski instructor. "Keen to get to the bottom of things," as always, Kenneth ransacks his store of accumulated wisdom in an attempt to explain how he and his uncle have both wound up "knee-deep in the garbage of 'personal life.' "

The answer eludes him, and his quest points toward despair. Thoughts, he decides, "don't get us anywhere; our speculations are like a stationary bicycle." But Kenneth's huffing and puffing amount to an engrossing spectacle: a mind, albeit weird, attempting to make sense out of the overwhelming flood of data that most people dismiss as daily life. Despite, or perhaps because of, what the narrator calls "my divagations and aberrations, my absurdities," More Die of Heartbreak crackles with intelligence and wit. The novel is not only proof that Bellow, 72, can live up to his own standards; it is also a reminder of how diminished a thing postwar American fiction would have been without him.