Like Miniver Cheevy, Born Too Late : LEWIS PERCY <i> by Anita Brookner (Pantheon: $18.95; 261 pp.)</i>

Like many of Anita Brookner’s protagonists, Lewis Percy seems to belong to an earlier, gentler age than the one in which he lives.

Though the novel is set for the most part in the jangling, frenetic London of the 1960s, both Percy and the remote, timid girl he marries are so Edwardian in outlook and attitude that you can’t imagine them listening to the Beatles or shopping on Carnaby Street, even though that’s the milieu in which they find themselves. To give Louis his due, he’s entirely and often painfully aware of the change and vitality surging all around him, acutely conscious that he’s allowed himself to become an anachronism.

Returning from a year in Paris during which he lived almost monkishly in a flat inhabited entirely by women, he expects his real life to begin once he’s back in London and his academic research on 19th-Century literary heroes is complete. He is a brilliant scholar, and his adviser has assured him that his thesis is publishable.

The devoted son of a widowed mother, he is kind, considerate and somewhat subdued, though by no means effeminate. Having spent his adolescence surrounded by women, he’s learned to love and admire them, to long for a wife and family of his own.

When his mother dies shortly after he arrives home, leaving him alone in a commodious house, he is particularly vulnerable. Working in the cloistered atmosphere of a library--his best friend a discreet homosexual, his social opportunities limited--he falls in love with the only young woman in his immediate environment. She’s Patricia Harper, called Tissy, ethereally pretty in a quaint and almost archaic fashion; an assistant at the library frequented by his late mother.

That seems to give them something in common, and when he learns that Tissy is an agoraphobe, his romantic nature is roused. How wonderful, Lewis thinks, if he could awaken her to life, lead her out of the narrow world in which she has confined herself. Shy and pale, even less worldly than he, Tissy seems a sleeping beauty waiting for her prince.

His notions of love and marriage formed by novels of the last century, Lewis eagerly projects himself into the role of rescuer. He follows Tissy and the formidable mother who calls for her each day home to their house, and wangles an invitation to tea. As vital as her daughter is wan, Thea Harper encourages the match, apparently glad to be relieved of the burden of her daughter and eager to resume a life of her own with her lover.

Tissy becomes the perfect wifey, polishing silver unused for a quarter-century, serving Lewis dinner from massive tureens. Patiently awaiting his return from work, seeing no one, passively fulfilling her modest conjugal duties as if instructed to close her eyes and think of England. She creates an atmosphere of perfect order and stultifying boredom.

None of this is what Lewis had hoped for, but he’s helpless to change it. When his one friend brings his actress sister to dinner, she immediately assesses the situation and makes herself available to Lewis. Lewis and Emmy have a lunch, a walk in the park, an hour of conversation in her flat, and that’s that. Lewis is too loyal and too decent to be unfaithful to his Tissy. Even so, she accuses him of infidelity and leaves him, returning to her mother to have their child, resuming her life as a virtual nun until, amazingly, she is radicalized by the women’s movement and finally achieves a delayed autonomy.

Lewis becomes an absentee daddy, dutifully visiting his daughter each day, watching his hopes wither and the already constrained boundaries of his life shrink still further. When Tissy is sufficiently vitalized to find a job and become involved with her employer, Lewis seizes his chance to begin again.

We leave him as we found him, in Paris, alone, in his late 30s, poised on the brink of life; everything that has happened in the years since his first sojourn abroad is merely an overture to a life still unlived.

Elegant, nuanced; at times almost Jamesian in its convolution and subtlety, Brookner’s prose is exquisitely suited to her characters and her themes. These are not people at home in their time; they shouldn’t speak in the careless jargon of the 1980s, but in the precise cadences and leisurely rhythms of a more congenial era, had they only been lucky enough to have been born a century sooner.