A Shrine to the Spirit of Nothingness : THE MUSIC OF CHANCE <i> By Paul Auster (Viking: $18.95; 217 pp.; 0-670-83535-8) </i>

There is an imaginative richness to Paul Auster’s sixth novel which offers many levels to enjoy in this short, deceptively simple book.

First, it is the compelling narrative of Jim Nashe, a man cut loose from his roots who finds himself in the company of a gambler and bets his future on the turn of a card. It is also a deeply American fable of the modern age in which the demons of loneliness and meaninglessness are confronted by existential acts of trust, responsibility, and faith.

Given Auster’s impressive intellectual background, it is not surprising that this story is a maze of literary mind games--metaphors and references that ricochet playfully from page to page, symbolic touches that alter your understandings of this escapade while it is in motion. At yet another level, in “The Music of Chance” (as in all satisfying serious fiction), there are profound philosophical issues with which Auster’s characters grapple.

Let us begin, as Auster does, with a straightforward exposition of the plot. As you will see, the more complex levels of this novel insinuate themselves gently along the way.

Jim Nashe, a Boston fireman, inherits nearly $200,000 from his father, whom he has not seen in more than 30 years. The money comes too late to save his shattered marriage, so he heads for Minnesota, where his sister is bringing up his only child, Juliette.

It becomes quickly apparent to Nashe that his daughter is better off staying in the happy family surroundings she has come to regard as her real home. He establishes a trust fund for her future with half the money, pays off the $32,000 he owes the Florida nursing home for convalescent care of his mother before her death, quits his job and gets rid of the contents of his apartment. Then, in a brand-new red two-door Saab 900, Nashe hits the open road with a vengeance.

Speeding aimlessly from state to state like a Joan Didion heroine in extremis or a Jack Kerouac character in the Age of Freeways, Nashe experiences a peculiar contemporary dissociation of sensibility: “Nothing around him lasted for more than a moment, and as one moment followed another, it was as though he alone continued to exist. He was a fixed point in a whirl of changes, a body poised in utter stillness as the world rushed through him and disappeared. The car became a sanctum of invulnerability, a refuge in which nothing could hurt him any more. As long as he was driving, he carried no burdens, was unencumbered by even the slightest particle of his former life.”

He drives alone like this, 16 or 17 hours a day, for more than a year. Then, one morning on a country road in Dutchess County, N.Y., he picks up a stranger, and his life changes. The stranger is Jack Pozzi, a man in his early 20s who earns his living playing poker. As they drive into New York City, he tells Nashe that he needs a $10,000 stake for a poker game he has set up with two wealthy “suckers” who won the Pennsylvania State Lottery. In a flash, Nashe impulsively decides to put up his last $10,000 for Pozzi: “The entire process couldn’t have taken longer than a second or two, but that was enough to send him hurtling over the edge of a cliff.”

When Pozzi sits down at the poker table with Bill Flower and Willie Stone at their isolated country estate, they wipe him out and win the entire $10,000. Worse, at Nashe’s insistence, he and Pozzi gamble further and end up owing Flower and Stone $10,000 more.

After considerable quarreling, he and Pozzi agree to a bizarre bargain: They will stay on the estate for 50 days and build a wall in order to pay off their debt. The second half of the book describes their experience of building the wall and Nashe’s changing thoughts as he finds fulfillment in this labor. This exploration of Nashe’s shifting sense of self-determination reads like a brilliant dramatization of Erich Fromm’s “Escape From Freedom.”

Early in this story, Auster presents Nashe with the Robert Frost dilemma of two off-ramps diverging on a freeway, and from then on, he evokes images from American myth and literature almost nonstop. Yankee Peddler/Dean Moriarty/Henry Miller allusions pop up as Nashe zig-zags across the American landscape with vaguely westward yearnings. After he meets Pozzi, their fantasies of wealth deliberately remind the reader of Jay Gatsby and Willy Loman. By the time Nashe and Pozzi, entranced by the music of chance, set off to seek freedom in a poker game, it is difficult to avoid thinking of Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi River on a similar journey.

The estate of Stone and Flower is located in the town of Ockham, Pa. By now, we could hardly think it coincidental that the 14th-Century English philosopher who expounded the principle that explanations in philosophy should be kept as simple as possible was William of Ockham; his principle was known as “Ockham’s Razor.”

In the huge house they occupy on the estate, one wing is devoted to Flower’s museum of knickknacks, things connected to history: “The telephone that had once sat on Woodrow Wilson’s desk. A pearl earring worn by Sir Walter Raleigh. A pencil that had fallen from Enrico Fermi’s pocket in 1942. General McClellan’s field glasses. A half-smoked cigar filched from an ashtray in Winston Churchill’s office. . . . It was all so random, so misconstrued, so utterly beside the point.” In case you don’t get the point, Auster adds, “Flower’s museum was a graveyard of shadows, a demented shrine to the spirit of nothingness.”

Stone’s wing of the house contains “the City of the World,” a miniature replica of a utopian city, including the house that they are standing in. Stone, a former optometrist, creates this all under magnifying glasses and is intending to make a model of his room containing the model, which would contain another room and another model. This is an echo of the replicated castle in Edward Albee’s play, “Tiny Alice,” in which the metaphysical questions of free will and man’s relationship to God are explored. The parallels with Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” are even stronger, with Nashe and Pozzi playing Lucky and Pozzo to Flower’s and Stone’s Vladimir and Estragon.

A critic enthralled by the possibilities of a sophisticated novel such as this runs the danger of making it sound like a boring trash heap of clanging symbols and arcane allusions. Permit me to eliminate any possibility of such an injustice: “The Music of Chance” is an accessible, readable story that can be enjoyed by readers of all levels. It is an exceptional novel about the interplay of freedom and chance which takes you on an engrossing tour of a man’s inner life. In fact, it is a revelation of the process Jim Nashe experiences.

Auster, a poet and translator whose “New York Trilogy” brought him critical acclaim as an experimental novelist, broke into the mainstream of literature last year with a novel called “Moon Palace.” At the end of his review of that book in the New Republic, Sven Birkerts noted that Auster “stands poised to write something momentous about our times.” He has done just that in “The Music of Chance,” a book that speaks to the little piece of Las Vegas in each of our hearts.