Hersey Strings Us Along : ANTONIETTA: A Novel, <i> By John Hersey (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 304 pp.)</i>

John Hersey is an author forged from three constituent elements: He was born in China of missionary parents, started his writing career as a reporter for Time in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and then became a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist on his first attempt at fiction.

He has carved himself a niche in the pantheon of American letters by following all three lines of attack at once--dramatizing his journalism, bulking up his novels with research, and preaching provocative homilies on modern social ills in the form of novelized parables and allegories.

This amalgam of techniques clearly has a readership: Hersey has been publishing books for nearly 50 years, often to wide acclaim. He has made himself a name as a first-rate journalist and an elegant moralizer. But literary omnidexterity has a downside.

At the muddy center of things, novels, sermons and news articles appear to share narrative elements, but at their limits, they are at war. Novels are complex, playful and ironic. Sermons and news articles tend to reduce complicated ideas to simple, easily understood formulae. News articles draw their inspiration from real life and are judged against real life; novels draw theirs from a patterning or aesthetic impulse.

The task of combining all three in perfect equilibrium in a single work is not only delicate, it is almost impossible. Hersey’s greatest success has not been in the novel form but in journalism--his 1946 book, “Hiroshima,” put a human face on nuclear war that has not been eclipsed in nearly 50 years. And his purely literary reputation never has been as high as his popularity might warrant.

“Antonietta,” Hersey’s latest work of fiction, isn’t a novel in the conventional sense--it’s a collection of five connected stories, purporting to be the biography of a violin, the so-called Antonietta Strad, built in Cremona in 1699 by the middle-aged, lovesick Antonio Stradivari and associated with, in subsequent stories, the lives and works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hector Berlioz, Igor Stravinsky and a tone-deaf 1980s inside trader named Spenser Ham.

“Antonietta” is of a piece with everything else Hersey has written. It is painstakingly researched. It is slick and intensely readable. It employs a weirdly awkward linking image as a unifying device (a magic violin that acts like a love potion--sometimes you get the idea Hersey is writing for children, then you remember that his first literary model was probably the Sunday-school story). And, at the end, it turns preachy (contemporary Americans are ruled by money and numbers).

When you finish reading this book, you feel as if you could build a violin or compose a symphony. You feel especially educated about composers. You feel you know how they think, how they make music out of ordinary human emotions like love and longing. You feel uplifted because you’ve absorbed some of that forbidding high culture--you can say something about Hindemith, Webern and Schoenberg without, thank God, having actually had to listen to the music.

These are all fun things to feel, and if you agree that arousing such feelings is the goal of art, then you would be forced to conclude that “Antonietta” is a terrific novel.

But the fact is there are two sorts of readers (as there are two sorts of people who listen to music): those who enjoy the work itself (listen for the interplay of melody, motif, harmony and orchestration) and those who prefer to enjoy the wash of feelings the work inspires in them. Hersey writes for the latter. Time and again in “Antonietta” he represents the experience of listening to music (and, by implication, reading a novel) as one of free-floating association--nostalgic memories, daydreams, fantasies.

Not only that, but he takes the more drastic and less defensible step of representing musical composition as the process of summoning such feelings and somehow (not clearly explained in the text) fluidly transcribing them into notes. “Music is memory. . . . Most of us have associations, usually nostalgic, that click into place when we hear certain tunes, but with Berlioz the connection is so much more intense that he states it in this extravagant way, as an absolute equivalence.”

Now, I don’t know if Berlioz ever said anything like this, but Hindemith, Webern and Schoenberg would have scoffed. Nor does this feeling theory explain anything about the nature of artistic genius. Instead it reduces genius to the level of everyman. It makes genius accessible by taking it to its lowest common denominator.

According to Hersey, Mozart was an emotionally immature neurotic who wrote great music as a way of making love to whatever girl he happened to be infatuated with at the time (exactly the way a teen-ager writes poems to his sweetheart). Berlioz wrote the “Symphonie Fantastique” so he could get a date with English actress Harriet Smithson. Stravinsky said, “My ancient great-grandfather used to create by having sex. I write music.” And Antonio Stradivari invented a new style of violin the day he fell in love with a black-clad widow tripping across the piazza outside his window (Hersey strains here to put the old violin/woman metaphor through its paces one more time).

This makes it easier for us to identify with greatness in a non-rigorous and patronizing way. But the truth is that Hersey’s journalistic and preachy sides (sentimental, popularizing, oversimplifying) have gotten the better of the novelist in him. “Antonietta” is a mid-list entertainment pumped up with steroids to look literary and intellectual.

It’s a con, and a good one--seductive, reassuring and eminently skillful. But let the reader beware: Believe nothing between these covers.