A Hiccup From Michener : THE NOVEL <i> By James Michener (Random House: $23; 446 pp.) </i>

Any reader familiar with James Michener’s books will approach his new novel, called “The Novel,” with some uneasiness.

“Hawaii,” “Iberia,” “Poland,” “Texas” and the many other doorstop books on which Michener has built his fortune are distinguished most by their startling comprehensiveness. He has been known to unwind his stories at the beginning of geological time, with volcanoes belching violently and glaciers sliding along the landscape, and only then to push them forward, at a pace any glacier would enjoy, into the coming of plant life, animal life and finally human life, until he lays them gently down in our own day.

When Michener’s storyteller tells a story, in other words, he tells the whole story, and if he undertakes a new novel called “The Novel,” what are we to expect? Long descriptions of the loam in the Pacific Northwest from which the mighty hardwoods grow, and the arrival of the lumberjacks singing their lumberjack songs as they fell the timber before retiring each night to the hardy camaraderie of the base camp, and then the unhurried trip of the lumber to the mill, where it is pulped and pummeled and kneaded into the paper sheets that are sliced and inked and bound together with twine and glue between cloth-covered cardboard and then loaded onto trucks. . . .

The possibilities could be endless, and in Michener’s hands they doubtless would have seemed so. But his fans will be surprised, perhaps relieved, by “The Novel,” for the trademark obsession with physical process is given a well-earned breather. Now in his 80s, Michener most likely intended this book to be a wise man’s summing up, reflections born of long experience on the magical act of creation itself, by a man who knows better than anyone how to squeeze several million dollars out of a two-pound slab of pulp.

It’s still a novel, though, not a pensee , and at 446 pages a mere hiccup in the Michener oeuvre . But an innovative hiccup. “The Novel” is in fact four novellas. Each is narrated by a different character, the first a Writer who writes a novel, the second an Editor who edits it, the third a Critic who reviews it, and the fourth--get the concept?--a Reader who reads it. Along the way are subplots about the foreign takeover of a distinguished publishing house, homosexual trysts in the mountains of Greece, and a suicidal love affair, punctuated with enough literary chatter to stupefy a hundred undergraduate seminars.

The novel of “The Novel” (this could get very confusing) is the work of Lukas Yoder, a 70-ish author who has turned his native Pennsylvania Dutch country into a literary gold mine. The first four books of his acclaimed fictional series bombed upon publication, but thanks to a steadfast editor, Yvonne Marmelle, his distinguished publishing house stuck with him until the fifth hit big money. We meet him as he pulls from his ancient typewriter the last sheet of foolscap of the eighth and last book in the series, a sure-fire smash, a guaranteed money machine.

But wait! When the manuscript is delivered into the care of Marmelle, there’s a hitch: The novel stinks. Or so Marmelle believes, a judgment confirmed by Book of the Month Club and the major bookstore chains, who review the ms. and turn thumbs down and noses up. Will the book be a stunning success anyway? Will critics swoon, readers devour, cash registers chime their merry tune?

Who knows? The reader surely won’t, for on this note Michener leaves Yoder and shifts to Editor Marmelle’s narrative, a melodrama of a poor but brilliant tomboy from Brooklyn who claws her way to the top at a distinguished publishing house despite a disastrous romance with a doomed but, I need not add, brilliant young novelist. From here we hobble to the Critic’s tale and then, after another 100 pages, to the Reader’s, whose story is so limp that Michener is compelled to revive it with a gruesome murder, much as an internist applies electric jolts to a patient whose heart has given out.

The shabby device works, sort of, but anyone who has gotten this far into the book will have been diverted already by a number of other curiosities. Although the novellas are offered by four different characters, each manages to write in the same inert prose. None shows the slightest gift for dialogue, or physical description. All fall into deep trouble dealing with the simplest elements of narrative, such as chronology and continuity. Each, came to think of it, bears a striking authorial resemblance to James Michener.

For his fans, the pleasure of a Michener book lies in the painless way he conveys information: history, geography, folkways. But very little about “The Novel” is creditable. At every turn of plot, implausibility lurks. When, for instance, that distinguished publishing house is sold to a foreign buyer, most of its top writers quit in protest, refusing to work for anyone but an American owner. Now, even a casual observer knows that this kind of hairy-chested patriotism would be considered unspeakably vulgar by our contemporary literati. When was the last time you went to a PEN meeting, Jim?

Similarly, Michener’s Critic (whose fundamental lit-crit tenet is, so help me, “The Imperative of the Now”) becomes “elated” when he’s offered the chance to teach a seminar called “Deconstructionism, the Pathway to Meaning.” Surely deconstructionism is a pathway to many things--fascism and insanity, to name only two--but “meaning” is an object not even its addled adherents would claim for it. Piled on top of one another, these implausibilities leave the reader with the impression that the author is writing on subjects about which he is essentially clueless.

That has never been James Michener’s problem in the past, and it’s surprising that a man who has sold a gazillion books--my own conservative estimate--hasn’t a better handle on the literary world. Not that the good old Book of the Month Club or those big chains will care. Michener is a trade name, and this variety of the publishing biz is the only one that the old fellow hits dead on.

“These days a book is a success before it even appears,” writes Lukas Yoder. “It all becomes so big. So unimaginable. And so damnably unfair.” Oh yes, it’s terrible, terrible. But I bet James Michener doesn’t mind all that much.