BOOK OF VIRTUE

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

IN HIS FOURTH NOVEL Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, has produced the sort of book that might offer William Bennett hope for America's cultural future. Mr. Ives' Christmas (HarperCollins; 248 pages; $23) is an homage to religious piety, unfailing modesty and moral rectitude. At the novel's center is Ives, a man who overcame his foundling-home beginnings to become a successful Manhattan illustrator and advertising executive. Despite his position, Ives lives a life devoid of bourgeois affectation. He gives to the poor, lusts for no one but his wife and refuses to judge those around him. He is a saint incapable of sanctimony.

Were Ives the creation of a less probing writer, his immutable goodness would seem comic. Characters like him show up in contemporary fiction as often as they do in real life, which is to say virtually never. But Hijuelos succeeds in making Ives believable largely by treating his kindness with almost perfunctory matter-of-factness. In unembellished sentence after unembellished sentence, Hijuelos lists Ives' charitable acts as if they were entries in a Filofax: "One of the things he did out of the office was to produce advertising to raise money for different funds, especially for Harlem kids. Working with the local church, Ives headed clothing and food drives..." The result is a character who appears wired to do the right thing the way others are programmed to pick up a cup of coffee on their way to work.

Ives' goodness is tested, as it inevitably must be, by tragedy. His son is randomly gunned down at Christmastime in 1967, and Ives spends years withdrawn and numb. Unlike Macon Leary, whose child suffers the same fate in Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist, Ives eventually finds quiet hope not in the arms of a quixotic woman but, less fashionably, through his faith in God. A faith that turns his indifference into compassion rather than hate. Never didactic, Mr. Ives' Christmas is a spare, moving meditation on the spiritual life.