‘Heathcliff ? No, Philip Roth Perfected’ : THE SHIKSA <i> by Barbara Bartlett (William Morrow: $18.95; 404 pp.)</i>

Ever since “Abie’s Irish Rose” hit Broadway in 1924, Jewish-Gentile romance has been a chestnut theme of America’s popular arts. Decades ago, when the myth of the melting pot was at full boil, the standard scenario was for the lovers and their families to overcome tribal prejudice--for the Jews to become Americans and the non-Jews to accept them as such. More typical recently is the oil-and-water story of a silver-tongued assimilated Jewish male--Roth’s Alex Portnoy, Woody Allen in “Annie Hall,” Charles Grodin in the brilliant Neil Simon-Elaine May film “The Heartbreak Kid”--hung up on an unattainable blond Venus.

It’s a still-fertile topic, upon which Barbara Bartlett’s “The Shiksa” promises to be a welcome new take, a clever bittersweet counter-Portnovian novel, told from the vantage of the goddess herself.

“Listen, Alexander Portnoy,” begins the Prologue, “were you aware, while you were complaining . . . in New Jersey, that all over America adolescent girls of a certain type were huddling in confessionals preparing for you?” A fine opening shot, followed a few pages later by another: adolescent Katherine Winterhaus, contemplating in church the “tortured, aquiline, supremely Semitic face” of Jesus cast in plaster, sees him as “The Son of God. Handsome, persecuted, omnipotent. Every Catholic girl’s first Jewish man.”

Katherine grows up in Rochester, N.Y., in a well-to-do family. At 11, she is enchanted by a joke-cracking Jewish department-store owner of her father’s acquaintance and is shocked to hear Dad remark that the only reason Eddie hasn’t cheated him is because he hasn’t had the chance. As a student at a convent-like women’s college, she falls for one Neil Kolodny; her mother gets sick and her father accuses Katherine of giving Mom cancer. (False alarm, but she does break up with Neil.) Small wonder that she marries a Protestant, a bit of a disappointment to parents Douglas and Emily, but at least he’s of wealthy Anglo-Saxon stock. Yet this doesn’t begin to slake Katherine’s deep need to rebel. She divorces Christopher, moves to Los Angeles and takes up with a series of Jews, paramount among them a notorious screenwriter and boulevardier many years her senior named Jed Bernard.

“His face was suntanned, his nose proud and fiercely aquiline, his eyes an unusual shade of light brown--the eyes of a Slavic poet, their kindliness belied by the cruel line of his mouth and the deep, sensual cleft in his chin. Max de Winter at the gates of Manderley, she thought . . . Heathcliff on the moors. No, said an inner voice. Philip Roth perfected. Every girl’s dream of the Jewish writer.”

Apparently influenced in equal parts by Roth and Daphne du Maurier, author Bartlett is caught fatally between them. Her book isn’t nearly sexy or realistic enough to hold its own as genre romance fiction. This isn’t to say there’s not a surfeit of detail in “The Shiksa”--we wade through endless years of Winterhaus family history and Katherine’s social calendar, informed to the hilt about who went where and what they were wearing. But the novel’s sense of place is severely undermined by an unmistakable air of anachronism: Bartlett’s Los Angeles of the 1960s--its shops, schools, culture--feels identical to today’s. When Jed and Katherine first meet, he takes her to a preview of the great Brando film “One-Eyed Jacks” (which she finds “soporific”), so we know it is 1961. Yet Jed lets the parking valet listen to tapes in his car. It’s a time-confusion so wild as to seem intentional, like a Freudian slip. (It prompts a guess that the author removed her story to the ‘60s arbitrarily, maybe to erase any innuendo of roman a clef, or in an effort, perhaps unconscious, to link “The Shiksa” more strongly to “Portnoy,” which appeared in 1969.)

The unreality extends to Katherine’s slavish devotion to the imperious, self-centered Jed, whose charming pet name for her is “crip,” short for “cripple.” It’s one thing to theorize about an obsession--”the Semitic planes of his face, as familiar as those swashbucklers from the Bible so dear to the romantic hearts of the Sacred Heart nuns, made convent bells chime in her heart”--and another to make it compelling in fictional terms. A novel is in trouble when its pop-psychological refrain makes better reading than the scenes among its main characters.

Witty and literary, “The Shiksa” very much wants to be. Katherine keeps quoting to herself from Eliot and Yeats, Proust and Cavafy, but it doesn’t help--the writing here includes too many lines like “Humor had fled from him as if he were a burning building” to qualify. Both Bartlett’s narrative voice and her heroine Katherine come off fairly unfunny and literal-minded, like a nice Catholic girl who wants to be saucy but can’t. Where the author seems on her most solid turf--scenes of Catholic home and school--her writing is the most convincing, but still too well-bred for its own good.

Katherine, after losing that laugh-a-minute rascal Jed for the umpteenth time, finds herself “following Jewish tourists down the Champs Elysees, hoping to hear some jokes.” This, unfortunately, is a very good metaphor for what’s so painfully wrong with this book. Even Jed, as executed by Bartlett, is missing his funny bone; except for the time he croons “Getting to Know You” during a proctological examination, his one-liners tend to misfire or sink into cliche. Katherine is so enamored of Jews, she peppers her conversation with Yiddishisms, but they sound, in her mouth, as out of tune as Jewish jokes. Indeed Bartlett’s overall awkwardness, however unintendedly, well serves her theme: The Shiksa can’t ever be Jewish, any more than Portnoy can be a guilt-free gentile--or than Bartlett can be Roth, no matter how much she loves him.

Yes, in the end, after an alienating trip to Israel with Jed, the death of both her parents, the sale virtually ex nihilo of two screenplays (we hadn’t realized she wanted to be a writer), and a distressing affair with another Jewish writer who is a pathological liar and not a writer after all, Katherine realizes she should be Jed’s friend, not his lover. “No more Jewish boy-friends. She could indulge her love of Jewish culture without marrying one.” Since Katherine’s idea of Jewish culture is apparently a blend of witty repartee, self-torment and the occasional matzoh, her strategy seems sound. Her daughter and Jed’s from their previous marriages (one is named Chris and the other Chryssie, for some reason) have both benefited from the experience, and Katherine too, one would imagine, has learned much--though in all frankness, I am not sure what. For on the story’s penultimate page, having sworn off forbidden fruit forever and returned to the bosom of the church, she meets an improbable, short, intense fellow and it’s deja Jew all over again. Don’t do it, Katherine.