FICTION

THE FEVER by Wallace Shawn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $17.95; 48 pp.) . Squeeze Tolstoy’s “Resurrection” down to a novella. Update it to the era of Central American death squads and the U.S. underclass. Lend it the speculative, conversational tone of the movie “My Dinner With Andre” (which Wallace Shawn acted in and co-wrote). That gives us “The Fever,” which is another way of saying that we still have Tolstoy’s “Resurrection.” It’s a critique of the privileged life--so uncompromising a critique that most of us will prefer to duck the issues altogether by citing its artistic shortcomings.

In “The Fever,” an American of indeterminate sex, liberal politics and cultural leanings feels his/her usual enthusiasms pall and is seized with a desire to visit “poor countries.” On one such trip, he/she collapses in a hotel bathroom, stricken by a malady that may be a vision. Bright memories of his/her past flash against the realization that “the life I live is irredeemably corrupt.” Our affluence depends on others’ poverty, our refinement on the work of distant torturers. Marxism may be discredited, he/she thinks, but in some ways Marx was right.

“My Dinner With Andre” grounded its philosophical lightning in two well-drawn characters eating a tangible meal. “The Fever” aspires to be universal but manages only to be vague. It’s an essay rather than a story--an essay that hammers shut all escape hatches. Good intentions, art, individual acts of kindness don’t matter. The only salvation is to give up our undeserved advantage: our money. This was Tolstoy’s answer, too, and that of primitive Christianity: an idea that, presented this baldly, only the desperate--or the feverish--may be prepared to accept.