Answers That Will Do for Now : THE ROMANTIC<i> by Aram Saroyan (McGraw-Hill: $16.95; 210 pp.; 0-07-054859-5)</i>

A brief, elegant study in self-reflection, “The Romantic” is a novel about a 40-year-old screenwriter, struggling with new-found success, whose latest screenplay--titled “Success!”--is about a novelist with the same problem. Like Aram Saroyan, anti-hero James Redding used to live in Marin County and continues to battle a powerful father, now dead. (James’ father--talk about male images--was a steel magnate; Saroyan’s was the playwright William, about whom he has written several books.)

Though “The Romantic’s” plot centers on James’ affair with Joan Wallin, a voluptuous Manhattan bookstore clerk, it’s really a book about fatherhood in art and life, about creation and procreation. James formerly wrote off-Broadway plays (Saroyan, a precocious devotee of the Beat poets, wrote in his youth such evocative one-word poems as “lighght”); his wife Betty, like the author’s, is a painter.

One day the couple concludes that their chic artistic poverty has deprived their three children of the advantages they had--a yuppie conundrum at all income levels--motivating James to take a stab at screenwriting. First time up, he hits a home run--a film called “London Bridge,” based on a vacation he took with Betty and friends. Money, a modicum of fame, a house in Connecticut swiftly follow.

For all that, the leitmotif here--James’ post-Portnovian complaint in effect--is that his life is controlled by women. He’s in a meeting about “Success!” with Annette, director of “London Bridge,” and Lindy, a fast-track 20th Century Fox executive who (in Annette’s admiring words) has “ ‘got the American heartbeat in her little pinky.’ ” Lindy, “in her mid-twenties, mid -twenties, “ seems--she and Annette speak in Hollywood code--to like the script. Yet James has a sudden rush of anomie:

“Why then did he feel like an aquarium from which all water had been drained, a forgotten appurtenance, once colorful and alive, now empty and scum-stained? His ego was at ground zero, and the trick, he knew, was not to say anything, to remain mute, mum, dumb--until the final amenities. It was simple. American business was going about its daily routine--he was on a veritable magic-carpet ride. Let the girls call the shots; he’d be well taken care of. His ability to write was as great a gift as beauty had been in a woman of his mother’s generation.”

“The Romantic” is ripe with erotic adventure, stirringly described--but James can’t blame his blast of satyriasis on glands alone. It is fear of obsolescence that fuels him at mid-life. His agent and magazine editor, along with the director and studio exec, are all high-powered Reagan-era women; now even they--not merely the ghost of papa--can get his goat. Is this a fair fate for a staunch man of the ‘60s who sees women’s rights as a cornerstone of a better world?

Lying on a hotel bed in Los Angeles, he reads a letter in “Penthouse” (an issue providentially left in the drawer with the Gideon Bible by the previous tenant) graphically describing a lesbian one-night stand and underscoring the superfluity of men. Next day, as again he leafs through the magazine, a grander gift from the Fates--a randy chambermaid--enters his room, and James seizes the absurd moment, straying for the first time in his long marriage, wreaking revenge against mortality in traditional male fashion.

On such a horizontal level the book resembles a minimalist, hip Harlequin novel for men. The prose, a quirky amalgam of poetry and pulp, is brisk and entertaining, if at times hard-polished. But the title--ironic, nostalgic and caustic--is a skeleton key to Saroyan’s intentions. James is a gentle, bewildered adulterer, his suddenly steamy behavior an aberration that he experiences in a state of permanent apology. The suburban philanderer as neo-existentialist--a stretch, but it works.

Saroyan neatly nails his philosophical point by counter-posing to James two other men: film director Allen Schweitzer, mid-30s, a deal-crazed Hollywood neurotic who sleeps with teen-age girls; and Connecticut neighbor Rick Henderson, a mystery writer of medium talents and comfortable with same. Henderson is nearing 50, soon to become a grandparent, settling with a smile into the afternoon of life. “Your life,” says Henderson, “has a goddamn design: I mean to see a new thing through into a young thing and then see it take its place in the world. My lord, that’s the damn song of the ages.”

James’ affair with Joan and Betty’s with a guy named Tony (to be modern--and to let James off easier--Saroyan has allowed her a teensy one too) soon fade and drop away, like the maple leaves in Connecticut. James is home from the hill, with his wife’s permission. Only now her power doesn’t knock him askew, for he has located his own. Betty’s suffering--and that of the jilted Joan--seem ancillary; this is James’ show.

He has centered himself simultaneously as father and artist. “My idea is to develop a kind of life rhythm,” James explains to Schweitzer, who doesn’t get it. “The only way out, as far as I can see, is actually finding ways to pay attention--or maybe instead of paying it, you know, on the capitalist model, just giving it away.”

Driving home from Manhattan, James passes a flagman on a road construction crew. He pays attention: “This was civilization; one guy takes care of traffic flow; another guy tries to figure out the secret meaning of things to present it to the first guy during his leisure hours. That was the movies.”

Toward the climax of this shrewd and touching parable, James confesses to his wife Betty that he is breaking under the strain of “all these details” in his life. Still, as he builds a fire, watching his family in all their glorious mundaneness--Betty loading the dishwasher; Paul, 9, playing with Cabbage Patch dolls; Stephanie, 11, reading a Judy Blume novel; Lisa, 14, listening to Talking Heads--he finds “the dance of all their identifies suddenly attaining a sort of perfect equilibrium, a transparency.”

Clearly there is poet’s play in that last, cathartic word--”transcendence” merged with “parent.” “Children keep the world going,” James muses, driving Paul home from the doctor. James the writer knows (in the architect Mies van der Rohe’s perfect phrase) that God is in the details, however prosaic they may seem. As a man of 40 he surely knows, too, that his solutions, however sublime, are only the next round of romantic panacea, just as trite and transitory as the celebrities and brand names with which this book of modern problems is peppered. But the answers will do for now, maybe for always.