What's the Diffidence?

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Craftsmanship is one of those old-fashioned words ruined by decades of pompous automobile ads. Applied to fiction, the word suggests a stubbornly unfashionable emphasis on structure and language over movie tie-ins and seven- digit advances. As Max Saw It (Knopf; 146 pages; $21) -- Louis Begley's second novel after his award-winning 1991 debut, Wartime Lies -- is simultaneously contemporary and the work of an elegant craftsman of the old school. Containing nary an ill-chosen word, As Max Saw It may turn out to be the most perfectly constructed novel of 1994.

The eponymous narrator, a self-contained middle-aged law professor at Harvard, introduces himself in the opening paragraph with passive-voiced modesty: "Relationships did not stick to me." The time is 1974, and Max, who is fleeing from the wreckage of his first marriage, is a summer-house guest on Lake Como, where he encounters the two characters who will shape his life over the next 20 years: Charlie Swan, a Harvard classmate from the 1950s turned famous architect, whom Max remembers as the campus Lothario; and Toby, a poised and polymorphous teenager who is soon to become Charlie's protege and lover. Yes, there is a romantic triangle at the core of the novel, but it does not play out with the cliches of AIDS-aware contemporary fiction. (The disease is a theme of the book but is never explicitly mentioned.)

The joy of reading Begley lies in his beautiful, economical virtuosity: characters are etched in three lines; epigram and description are effortlessly paired, as when he writes, "Death is the greatest of sculptors. His modeling knife had removed all but the most indispensable matter from ((his)) face." But for all of Begley's talent and painstaking technique, the novel never transcends artifice. Craftsmanship remains a wonderful virtue, but it's no substitute for genius.