BOOK REVIEW : A Tale of Grief That Celebrates Life : BEN<i> by Max Schott</i> North Point Press $17.95, 157 pages

I suppose it’s no way to sell a book--to say that “Ben” is the perfect gift for people in grief; for those who have lost a loved one to death, or those marking time until their broken hearts get healed. But “Ben” is 5,000 times better than those well-meant but really useless volumes on “What to Do When Your Mother Keels Over.”

“Ben” takes a cast of characters who are all in grief of one kind or another. But then, behind them, in front of them, all around them, the author paints a brilliant universe, an ongoing life, all the stuff that waits for people in grief once they get over it, once they snap out of it. More than that, this novel deals with the pinpoints of delight that sometimes happen within the process of grief itself--those moments, even when your heart is smashed, when you get a really good cup of coffee, or someone says something funny and you can’t help but laugh.

“Ben” is a tour de force. The author takes a wild chance and spends the first 20 pages or so in very heavy exposition: Young Max, who lives in a Southern California suburb, is 11, maybe 12. Max tells the story here: He doesn’t have friends to speak of, but spends his after-school hours hanging around rental stables, cleaning out the stalls, helping out his friend, Ben.

Ben, a grown-up. A guy around 35, a horse trainer, a former farmer, a raw-boned man with perfect manners and an astonishing frankness. Max idolizes Ben, for two good reasons. The first is Ben’s kindness, and the fact that he’s going through life right now with a broken heart. He was married for a while to a girl named Audrey, much younger than he. Audrey is a natural rodeo performer, an expert at Roman riding, in which two horses are strapped tightly together and made to gallop around the arena: The trick is to slide off when it gets scary, and not to fall underneath and get trampled. When Ben treated her badly, Audrey slid out. (Roman riding as a metaphor for marriage. Pretty nice.)

The second reason Max craves Ben’s company is that at home, things aren’t too good. Max’s mother is dying of a brain tumor. Max’s father, a chemist, is faltering. He can’t think; he can’t do his work. Max’s mother’s sister, the beautiful Anna, pitches in with all the sad sickbed duties, but Anna’s emotions are complicated by the fact that she’s head over heels in love with Max’s father and always has been.

What happens during tragedies like this? People still have to eat dinner. People have to suffer. People have to fall in love.

When Ben meets Max’s family, it seems that the rugged horse trainer is going to get his beloved Audrey back. Ben buys a farm, and invites Max and his family up for a visit. The rest of the novel breaks away in perfect scenes and conversations. Ben and Max’s dad remake a bed with a rubber sheet, because Max’s mother is incontinent. Max waits for the sky to fall, but it doesn’t. The two families spend an evening on a veranda. Life ticks by. The next morning, Audrey, in tears, tells Anna she’s not going to be able to cut it with Ben.

Soon Max’s mother dies, and Audrey leaves--for good, this time. Max and Ben, so different in so many ways, enter together into a season of grief. But there are horse auctions, and rodeos, and second choices, which might turn out to be the right choices after all. Life is wonderful, and very surprising. “Ben” deserves to be read on its own as a perfect little novel, but the prudent buyer will stock up on three or four copies, for when the wife runs away, the cancer metastasizes; the children crouch in a corner, confronted with the random horrors that are part of any surprising life.

NEXT: Jack Miles reviews “Repap 1990 Media Guide: A Critical Review of the Media’s Recent Coverage of the World Political Economy,” edited by Jude Wanniski (Polyconomics/Repap Enterprises).