HIS CUP RUNNETH OVER

By John Skow

FOR THE SECOND TIME IN HIS LAST two novels, literary magician Mark Helprin, 47, offers the reminiscences of an eccentric, brilliantly cross-grained geezer. In his 1991 novel, A Soldier of the Great War, he portrayed an indomitable hero who was a soldier and lover when young and, despite adversities, a philosopher and contemplator of art when old. It was perhaps the work of a young man assuring himself that life can be a reasonable, dignified progression toward old age.

There is some of this romantic, celebratory quality in Memoir from Antproof Case (Harcourt Brace; 514 pages; $24), but reasonableness does not rule. As we meet the novel's main character, he is 80 or so, hiding out in Brazil from real or imagined assassins, writing down his adventures and stashing them in an ant-proof case for his beloved 10-year-old stepson to read when he is older.

What the boy will make of this extraordinary history is hard to say. His stepfather has been, variously and with high spirit, a U.S. fighter pilot shot down in the Mediterranean in World War II, a billionaire, an ex-billionaire, a bank robber, a wholehearted lover of women, a convicted killer while still a teenager and, as a result of that, an inmate in a Swiss sanatorium during his high school years. But what he has been most consistently, through all the splendidly entertaining capers and calamities that Helprin invents for him, is what people call, in short, a nut.

This he repeatedly demonstrates with his furiously maintained belief that coffee is loathsome, a blight on mankind. By his own account, he does not simply disdain coffee; he rages against it, preaches of its evils, overturns coffee urns in restaurants. He breaks up a marriage to a beautiful, intelligent and adoring woman because she backslides and drinks the foul stuff. Et, for several hundred pages, some very peculiar cetera.

Reading Helprin's marvelously imaginative tales has always required wafting along with a flood of eloquence and accepting that floods are by nature excessive. There are few authors of whom it is less profitable to ask what in the world he may be getting at. Among novelists who fall into the magician category, Joyce and Nabokov, far more cerebral writers, could produce verbal astonishments as readily. Not many others come to mind. If there is a trouble with Helprin's writing, it is that readers may have come by now to expect little more than to be dazzled every few pages.

Which they certainly will be in Antproof, a wonderfully strange and funny novel. Here's the hero, learning by the succession of paintings in his office that his position in a Manhattan bank is shaky. First his Rembrandt is replaced by a Durer: "Within a week, however, it too was gone, replaced by a Monet ... If someone were trying to send a message to me, they were being incredibly subtle. In fact they were. The next day, the Monet was gone and a Vuillard was in its place ... It was clear that all was not well." Wit at this level balances almost any degree of obsession, and yes, thanks, another cup-black, no sugar.