A Life After Death : FIVE SEASONS A Novel <i> by A. B. Yehoshua; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin (Doubleday: $19.95; 359 pp.; 0-385-23130-X)</i>

Molko, the protagonist of A. B. Yehoshua’s “Five Seasons,” is a 50-year-old accountant in Israel’s Ministry of the Interior in Haifa who has watched his wife die of cancer after a long, unrelieved struggle. Because his life has been centered in the sick room for the better part of a decade, his wife’s death is, inevitably, a release, but Molko is like a trout put back into the water after being hooked. Before swimming again, he remains immobile for a while, breathing in and breathing out his old element, as if trying to recover a long lost impulse.

So begins this extraordinary novel which tracks--in a fluent, highly intimate, third-person narrative--the year in Molko’s life that follows his beloved wife’s passing. The father of three children, all of them grown but the last (a sulky high school boy who is close to being left back a grade), his daily round includes his apartment and his job; the old people’s home where his mother-in-law (a delightfully lucid German Jew in her 80s) resides; and an occasional visit to his mother in Jerusalem.

Unlike his late wife, Molko has roots in Israel going back five generations in his Sephardi family. Passive, a little overweight, a compulsive penny-counter not above small irritations, and an innocent before getting married 30 years earlier, he is a perfect, permeable center for a novel that begins in a dark room and, as Molko gains confidence and autonomy, goes on to explore Paris, West Germany, the Galilee Heights, Jerusalem, and even, in a second trip to Germany, crosses the Berlin Wall.

Along the way, there is much memorable evocation of land and cityscape and attendant weather of all varieties; of opera, Tolstoy, and, most important, a number of women. Of the latter, an old crush of Molko’s Jerusalem boyhood, a beauty who went off with a charismatic truth-seeker, and who at 50 is sadly childless and still unformed, is, along with Molko’s polar-opposite mother-in-law, an unforgettable portrait.

What is the central pleasure of a good novel? Jack Kerouac, who could claim at least one classic (“On the Road”) for his authority on the subject, said it was good companionship. By this standard, among others, “Five Seasons” is as satisfying and rewarding a novel as I’ve encountered in a long time. Here is Molko with his old crush, the tall Ya’ara who refuses to wear makeup and now has a little pot belly that makes her resemble a question mark. Molko has driven her to a settlement in Yodfat so she can visit the house she once lived in with her truth-seeker, Molko’s boyhood camp counselor. Standing on some crates, Ya’ara peers in a window at the house, the scene of at least one of her miscarriages and a long convalescence:

“ ‘But why not go inside?’ he suggested. She threw him a grateful look, stepped down from the crates, circled the house to a locked door, and groped for a rusty key above the lintel. With a squeak, it turned in the lock. Pushing the door open with her little belly, she stepped unhesitatingly inside. Molko remained in the doorway, peering curiously into the house, which looked surprisingly tidy, with its plain furniture, straw mats, and shelves full of books and clay figurines. Who last had lived here? he wondered. Had they had children? Ya’ara stood looking around her, tall against the low ceiling. She looks best in this gray light, he thought as she led him to her old room, though I’ll never know her if I don’t make love to her. If she would only cry now, it would melt me so fast that sex would be no problem. Yet, though he waited patiently, she did not. Eagerly she prowled about the room, handling things, forgetting she was not in her own house, even opening an old closet as if hoping to find her dead babies there.”

The beautifully observed, transparent tenderness of this passage is one of the hallmarks of “Five Seasons,” along with virtually hundreds of small felicities in the prose of Hillel Halkin’s fine translation. The five seasons provide the book’s primary divisions, from one “Autumn” through the next one. Within these major sections, there are frequent numbered divisions, which serve to ventilate and pace the narrative.

T. S. Eliot once remarked admiringly of Henry James that he had a mind so fine that it was unblemished by even a single idea. He was speaking, I think, of the novelist as literature’s supreme expositor of the fullest possible moment-to-moment play of the human being, in which ideas per se can only be another element, not a ruling design. In an age of meta-fiction, super-realism, and all the other current strategies, Yehoshua, in his third novel, with its shy, unassuming protagonist, has returned us to such a standard. In the opinion of one grateful reader, he has written a masterpiece.