Sean O’Faolain as a Russian Storyteller : AND AGAIN? <i> by Sean O’Faolain (Birch Lane Press/Carol Communications: $16.95; 287 pp.; 1-55972-003-4) </i>

An elderly gent in the Dublin suburb of Dun Laoghaire (“red-nosed, mouth pursed like a witch without her dentures, pink eyelids”) has his little morning routine disturbed one day in 1965 by a note slipped underneath his door. It is from the gods (Department of External Affairs, Mount Olympus) offering him a choice between a violent end to his life that morning or a chance to relive the whole of it again. The decision is rendered Hobson-like by the fact that he must this time travel backwards, getting younger by the year until he regresses to the womb, and upon a path made into a mine field through confiscation of his most vital luggage--his memory.

Sean O’Faolain has set himself a daunting task--to tell a story, the outcome of which is made inevitable by its proposition. His further conceit is to make the proposition an impossible one. His excuse is that credulity must be dispensed with before real truths can be tackled and that he is, by romantic disposition, a Russian (though Irish by nationality), and by natural inclination, a short-story writer.

There is a world of difference between the short-story writer and the novelist. The novelist develops themes. When a natural short-story writer tackles a novel, he enlarges his form by seizing upon a really grandiose idea (Updike’s “Witches of Eastwick,” Joyce’s “Ulysses”). The English with their reverence for the novel do not like this heady cocktail of philosophy with fiction (except in a novella), and it is left mainly to Irish and Russian storytellers to lead their audience away from the fireside and into outer space.

O’Faolain is best known as a masterful and prolific short-story writer whose work has been compared to Chekhov’s. His three previous novels dealt with the folly of extreme nationalism. “And Again?” also is more concerned with ideology than with plot, but now his quest is to challenge Einstein’s proposal that “Happiness, well-being and pleasure are pursuits worthy only of a pig.” His defense is a brilliant, sensual apologia, which teeters over thin ice and topples over waterfalls, occasionally tries the patience of the reader, but overall engages, seduces and stimulates.

Despite his fantastic theme, O’Faolain is no fabulist. His plot is a parable for all of life’s everyday mysteries and miracles and has as its practical counterpart a complex consanguineous theorem. His hero’s pursuit of (and invention of) a past is echoed by a genealogical manhunt by his wealthy American relative (grandson?) for romantic Irish-rebel antecedents.

The novel’s mythic supposition is pegged down with piquantly grim reality. Directly after the hero, Bobby Younger, has communed with the gods, we see him contemplating his disgusting, old man’s toothbrush. In the moment that he accepts his second life--”his belly churning gall, honey, fear and hope, staring before him in a frenzy of joy at that exquisite inflection known as future tense”--he allows a runaway truck to splatteringly claim in his stead a little girl on a bicycle. In the very first instant he is robbed of the chance to relive life nobly.

None of the characters is remarkable, except in the way that every human being is. The hero, Bobby Younger, is wise, clever and romantic, but small of heart. A lifetime’s experience has taught him only that life (in spite of loss, remorse and heartbreak) is sweet and too short. Second time around, he eschews earthly ambition in favor of love with four women (including three generations of one family), his mature but mortal brain practicing miserly romantic economies even as he is going off his head with love. He courts his women with the (adapted) letters of Victor Hugo to Juliette Druout and one by Balzac from “Louis Lambert.” Jealousy, infidelity and a hint of incest season his passions. Having no future, he pursues his past and finds in it the haunting ghost of his first wife, whom he hunted into and then out of a convent to satisfy his pride and convenience.

O’Faolain is a Chekhovian in love, enchanted as much with the flaws that verify the uniqueness of his lovers as with passion’s power to transform them to perfection. Ana, Bobby’s first lover, who is 65 and has been the enduring passion of his earlier life, is “a raddled old erotic” with “vulnerable elbows” and the face of a small pig.

When Ana dies, Bobby insinuates himself into love with her daughter, Anador, an androgynous figure with, “shrewdly peering eyes . . . a vigorous laugh . . . a fist that looked capable of knocking down a horse.” As he declines, in the most literal sense, in years, he becomes involved with Nana, the grand-daughter of his first lover, whom he describes as “bottomy” until “desire transforms weight into wealth.”

Tenderness rather than sexual explicitness dominates these into swooningly sensual sequences. Small humiliations merit the same compassion as great heartbreaks. In a poignant episode, practical, middle-aged Anador, made reckless by romance, brings her lover with her to Harrods in London to choose a nightgown. As she holds one after another flimsy creation before her flushed face and substantial figure, her lover grows boorish through embarrassment until he destroys her by hissing loudly: “You have no waist!”

O’Faolain is a master of prose and as skillful a manipulator of language as his hero is of women, intimate enough to know when the informal adjective conveys the most exact sense. He speaks of old age “cadging” youth from the young.

The message of the novel is that “no gods’ amount of experience teaches us mortals a damned thing”; its moral is that life itself--the accidental pattern of birth and love and scrappy learning--is of itself more glorious than we know.

Like Updike, O’Faolain uses his novel as a packhorse for an extraordinary wealth of endlessly chewable ideas: Space does affect space dwellers. After all, the Russian imagination was thriving in and on the expanses of its own vast, melancholy Oblomovist steppes--Gogol, Turgenev, Lermentov, Goncharov, Chekhov--at the same time that the formative generations of America were being nourished to manhood on a similar vacancy. The difference is that whereas Russian space reinforced fate, oppressed the spirit and released a boundless, brooding imagination, American space rejected fate, enlarged the spirit and let loose a boundless ambition.

This novel, both boundlessly imaginative and ambitious, shows O’Faolain an accomplished traveler and a consummately accomplished writer. It does suffer from some flaws, the most distracting of which is its choreography. Moving backwards against time, the characters shift their relative positions of generation not once nor twice but three times in a man’s life that doubles on itself to a span of 130 years. In spite of O’Faolain’s emphatic mathematics, there are too few pointers to each period, and one finds oneself, again and again, reminded of the old riddle: “If this man’s father was my father’s son . . .”

Sumptuous narrative sometimes loses the run of itself, as where the author donates an exquisite, evocative commentary (“The house was a whirl of rooks, a shriek of blackness against the sunset”) to stout Anador.

This is O’Faolain’s first novel in 39 years and (by virtue of the fact that it was written 10 years ago) his only novel in almost half a century. Given the fact that he is now 89 years of age, it is almost certainly his final full-length work. Flawed, luminous and with a matchless understanding of and zest for life, it is reckless, full-blooded, intellectual literature that will delight and invigorate readers malnourished by the LeanCuisine diet of mannered-modern miniaturists.