Insect Epiphanies : STILL LIFE WITH INSECTS <i> by Brian Kiteley (Ticknor & Fields/ Houghton Mifflin: $15.95; 140 pp.; 0-89919-898-8) </i>

This first novel by Brian Kiteley presents us with a disconcerting metaphor: Insects live by instinct and tropic responses, whereas modern man is increasingly deracinated and cut off in his thinking and feeling.

Elwyn Farmer is an amateur entomologist who is recovering from a nervous breakdown and keeps a meticulous journal that is ostensibly concerned with insect sightings, but inevitably the journal spills over into anecdotal material relating to Elwyn’s family and peers. The result is a casual glimpse into how truly Cubist and dissociated the contemporary psyche has become, cut off as it is from its primal planetary rhythms.

At times, Farmer confronts the central metaphor of the book directly:

“A certain male moth smells nothing but the pheromone of his mate, but he can detect that pheromone five miles away. In a dozen square miles of wheat, the pests are unable to stop eating. They reproduce insanely to meet the demand. I suggested mixing up the breeds of wheat or growing legumes--using the old rules of crop rotation--to keep the threat of pests down. One fellow in field research laughed. ‘You’re actually trying to outwit insects? Just spray them dead.’ ”

But most of the time Farmer keeps his own low-key observations to himself:

“I wasn’t a good father or husband. I had no ambition other than to survive.”

Novelist Kiteley achieves his best effects through simple juxtaposition, as in these two passages that are separated by only a few sentences:

“Whit Wheaton hanged himself the day I took him collecting. Three days later my sister Ruth broke up several dozen barbiturate pills into a harmless mixture of milk and coffee-flavored liqueur and died in her stupefied sleep.”

“Larvae, which feed on dead rodents. The adults tunnel underneath the carcass, or drag it to loose dirt, and bury it--hence the name, Burying Beetle.”

Throughout the novel there is an eerie sense of remorseless cruelty and banal absurdity:

“I was about fifty yards away, watching the kangaroo mouse through binoculars. He hopped a few yards, then stopped, stiff with fear. A moment passed and so did his fear. He began to clean himself, washing off the embarrassment of a false alarm. Then he stood on hind legs to yawn, one paw raised, the other curled against his chest. For this instant he looked like a little boy I know after he’s caught in mischief. The next instant I saw the blur of a shadow and the talons of a hawk slicing cleanly through the head of the mouse, one claw popping out his eye.”

This banal remorselessness is matched on the human level by a movie mogul who has fallen in love with a rodent caricature:

“There’s a story about Jack Warner. He was doddering around his big office. Every year he signed an enormous check of money over to us. But one year he said to his treasurer, just as he was about to sign, ‘I love that Mickey Mouse. Tell them to do more shorts with him.’ The treasurer said, ‘I don’t believe Mickey Mouse is with us.’ The budget got slashed.”

The novel ends in a plaintive voice:

“Oh, Professor.” He laughed. “Help us evolve back into human beings.”

In this elliptical persona of Elwyn Farmer, Brian Kiteley has created a contemporary echo of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s epochal short story, “Metamorphosis.” But whereas Gregor has relapsed back to the insect realm, Farmer remains curiously immunized from the insects that so fascinate him, all the while he becomes more and more unconnected from the human realm that is still his habitat. Farmer is a lone voice that seems hauntingly prophetic, if we could only figure out what it is he is trying to tell us.