A Tryst of Lemon : DAMAGE <i> By Josephine Hart (Alfred A. Knopf: $17.95; 200 pp.) </i>

To read this noir tale of mutual obsession between a smugly prosperous 50-year-old and his son’s witchy fiancee is like being abducted for a prank. I found myself protesting vigorously, then rather enjoying it, then waiting impatiently to see where we would get to, and finally wondering what it had all been about.

The abduction vehicle is preposterous--an ornate barouche bumping down a freeway. Josephine Hart tells her story through her narrator/protagonist. His voice is a caricature of English Edwardian assurance and over-decoration. As he speaks of himself, his placidly successful professional and family life, the passion that overtakes him and its bloody end, he does so in a virtually unbroken stream of Gothic-romance cliche.

He is too much; so is his upper-class Englishness, his complacency, his spiffy family and the tormented Belle-Dame-Sans-Merci upon whom everything shatters. It is an author’s effrontery; surely, she is having us on? Yet the effrontery is part of the excitement; it disorients us and leaves us more open to the suspense of her tale. Hart has made unbelievable characters who say unbelievable things. Using them, she has managed to create a portrait of psychological and erotic obsession that is so compelling as, for a brief moment, to suck all the oxygen out of our air and leave us half-silly.

For the first 30 pages of this novella, the narrator sets his scene. He is rich, the son of a hard-driving and cold father. That paternal hardness and coldness will, of course, be used to signal future filial unsoundness. Chekhov’s pistol--if you see it in the first act, it will go off in the last--is here an entire armory of guns, booby traps, trip wire and deadfalls.

N. (I will call him that for convenience; the author gives him no name) has succeeded despite his inheritance. He is a doctor; he has married the daughter of a rich, old-style Tory landowner. Encouraged by his father-in-law, he has gone into politics, won a seat in Parliament, risen to the rank of junior minister and been mentioned as a someday prime minister. His wife, Ingrid, is still gracious and lovely; his son, Martyn, is dark and handsome and a rising journalistic star, and his daughter, Sally, is “a true English rose.”

N. will have occasion, over and over, to stress his life’s manifold roses, often in just that kind of embroidered-sampler phrase. As he assembles these roses, he carefully places their canker as well. He is loveless, a hollow man.

Of his training at Cambridge, he tells us: “Though I studied the myriad ills of the body and ways to soothe them, this brought me no closer to my fellow man.” And now: “I hid the awkwardness and pain . . . and tried to be what those I loved expected me to be.” But he is so frozen by his father--”So it is with powerful personalities. As we swim and dive away from them, we still feel the water is theirs”--that he will never achieve more than the motions. “Time rode through my life--a victor. I barely clung to the reins.”

In this tepid Jell-O state, he is at first only dimly aware of his wife and Sally grumbling about Martyn’s new girlfriend. Anna, they complain, is dark and strange and eight years older. Then, at a party, he meets her for a moment. She is tall, dead-white, black-haired, strong-featured and entirely un-roselike. Their glances lock; he feels, he tells us, as if he had found his true home. When Martyn introduces them a few days later, neither mentions having met. The mutual silence is a declaration; a few days later she phones him.

“Hello, this is Anna,” she says.

“Go to your house. I will be there in an hour,” he says. He goes, she opens the door. She lies down on the floor and they make wordless, desperate love. It is the first of many such scenes in various indoor and outdoor locales. Sometimes she is tied up with ribbon.

Soon, she tells him of her past. Her brother loved her, tried to make love to her, and then killed himself. Upon discovering his body, she immediately had sex with a boyfriend. This told her that she would survive. “All damaged people are dangerous,” she warns N. “Survival makes them so.”

Anna’s and N.’s murky and consuming affair continues, even as she prepares to marry Martyn. It is agony for N., but she insists that she needs both their own private love and a public “normal” life with Martyn. She rents an apartment just for them. She will be his slave there, she tells him, but it will be in a kingdom that she sets up.

The triangle turns bloody. Without revealing the plot--since suspense is central to the book--it is clear that Anna will indeed survive. Using Martyn and his father, she has replayed the old rite of incest and death, and presumably has purged herself of them. N. and Martyn are less fortunate.

The remarkable thing about “Damage” is how well it works despite its melodramatic plot, its stilted characters--they have little interest or reality in themselves; they are made exclusively, if ingeniously, for their dooms--and the narrator’s purple cliches. For one thing, these flaws come to seem a matter of intent, both in their extremity and in the suggestion of deadpan lilt with which the author delivers them. Perhaps I imagine the lilt. It is a dangerous literary game--what is the difference between artful badness and badness, plain?--but it tends to work.

If so, this is only because Hart shows such skill in working the primal emotions of her psychological thriller. If terrorists wear Mickey Mouse masks, they may look silly, but their weapons kill, nonetheless, and perhaps the silliness makes the terror worse. While it is working through, we cannot relinquish this story of twin obsessions. And it does not relinquish us.

Only, once it is over, we are exactly where we were. We have been moved, or at least titillated, but we have not moved. Nothing remains. N. and Anna leave not the faintest aftertaste; perhaps that is their virtue. “Damage” does remarkably little.