FICTION : THE SENSATIONIST <i> by Charles Palliser (Ballantine Books: $15; 160 pp.)</i>

Another man prowls after women, this time in a decaying industrial city that resembles Glasgow, Scotland, where author Charles Palliser teaches. This man, David, isn’t interested in violence--just in quick, uncomplicated sex. He finds plenty. The complications begin only when he meets a woman, Lucy, whom he begins to love--a woman with a child and problems of her own.

Palliser (“The Quincunx”) gives this short novel an air of foreboding and mystery, but he does it in a mechanical way that some readers would label as cheating. He restricts us to David’s point of view, then simply withholds a lot of information that David would have: the names of the city and country, the nature of the work he does for a high-tech firm (it has something to do with computers) and the identity of people who are referred to at the beginnings of scenes just as “he” or “she.”

The idea seems to be to blur the distinctions between human beings, in contrast with the detail lavished on buildings, landscapes and weather. If David treats women as sex objects, his hard-driving bosses treat him as a production unit. What is the source of his erotic appeal? Why are his actions so much cruder than his perceptions? Why is Lucy abusive to herself and others? Such questions are left hanging because--this may be Palliser’s intent--the real main character of “The Sensationist” is the city, with its “bloody history,” its poverty and its freezing winters, when days narrow to cracks of light and nobody’s interior climate stands a chance.