The Fiction of Thither and Yon : HENCE <i> by Brad Leithauser (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 320 pp.; 0-394-57311-0) </i>

Brad Leithauser’s second novel doesn’t concern the future so much as the impossibility of ever comprehending what our future may hold. As Garner Briggs, the hypothetical author of “Hence” argues, we never completely understand anything--the future, people, lives or events; we only invent stories about them. By learning to distrust the fictional worlds we inhabit--America, say, Truth or Justice--we can free our imagination to wander hence, into new and uncharted territories that are vaster and more meaningful than any mere story.

“Hence” presents itself as a book within a book, giving us plenty of reasons to distrust it. Equipped with its own title page, epigraphs and retrospective introduction, “Hence: A Meditation in Voices” by Garner Briggs, does not pretend to be a story or autobiography so much as a sort of philosophical reminiscence. Set in the late 20th Century, it is being reprinted by a “renegade aesthetician” somewhere deep in the 21st.

Briggs, a professor of law, examines the story of his brother, Timothy, a 21-year-old junior chess master lured into a highly publicized tournament with ANNDY, a formidable computer manufactured by America’s premier and irreproachable Congam Corp. Garner considers Timothy’s contest a parable of men confronted by the machinery they create--machinery that includes the mechanical images and high-tech fictions of television and magazines. As public interest in the tournament increases, Timothy feels more and more entrapped by his quickly media-fied role as a sort of postmodern John Henry. He becomes lionized; someone even offers to compose his theme song.

Garner, a legal theorist worried by the way laws define imaginary human “norms,” fears that the entire world is becoming like his deceased father’s fact-filled notebooks, monuments to what Garner refers to as “the tyrannous, benighting, stultifying effect of a methodical mental consistency.” Garner wants to tell his story instead “with an irregular consistency, which is to say, an inconsistent consistency, which is to say, with that unflinching comprehensiveness accessible only to paradox.”

Deliberately, then, Garner steadfastly refuses to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. He does not want to present data; he wants to complicate it.

Timothy’s confrontation with ANNDY, his strange affinities for his dead twin brother, Tommy, and the ominous unyielding world of corporations and media all make for a set of intriguing narrative premises; unfortunately, however, these premises are methodically disregarded as the novel develops (or, perhaps more accurately, as it refuses to develop). What begins as a compelling read turns aimless, cloudy and abstract. Timothy abandons his beautiful publicist, Vicky, after a bungled seduction in order to return to his hometown and resume a mindless courtship with his placid, cowlike childhood sweetheart; he buries himself in the routine, customized meals and schedules of Congam’s Totaplex Hotel, until his rather anxious claim that he is the “human being” in the tournament begins to sound grimly ironic; he develops a sudden passion for the self-lacerating televangelist, Reverend Rabbit (a man obsessed, like Garner and Timothy, with the world’s lies and deceptive surfaces). The progress and outcome of Timothy’s match with ANNDY is eventually disregarded altogether (becoming referred to only as something our hypothetical future readers already “know”), and even Garner’s controlling narrative voice quickly diffuses and fades away. One begins to feel that even the narrator has lost interest in his own paradoxical anti-narrative.

Deprived of any sense of narrative urgency, the central and concluding chapters of Leithauser’s novel inflate with almost endless, blithe chatter: people ordering dinner, perusing shopping malls, and endlessly wandering the glittering soundless corridors of the Totaplex Hotel. The book degenerates into an exasperating montage of observational bits and conversational asides, as mundane and trivial as the notebooks of Garner’s father. Eventually, in this book concerned with the problems of men and machines, the reader begins to wonder what is more mechanical: the machinery of plot, or the machinery of Leithauser’s critical method.

By the end of this novel, the reader has forgotten to care anymore, since the people he cares about have all grown unfocused and uninteresting. The various family and interpersonal relationships never yield any emotional stuff: Nobody ever realizes anything, or does anything, or feels anything. Like the, by now, rather careworn and conventional School of Fictionality--Barth, Calvino, Lem, Gass--Leithauser takes deliberate pains to say something about the relationships between fiction and our world, but he has neglected to write absorbing fiction in the meantime. It is one thing to argue that our world has grown disaffected, mechanical and sad; it is another to write a disaffected and mechanical book about it. Despite all his talent, Leithauser, like many literary academics (or even like many writers of conventional science fiction) displays more concern for his theories in “Hence” than he does for his people.