The School of Cruelty : BOYS OF LIFE <i> By Paul Russell (E. P. Dutton: $18.95; 309 pp.) </i>

This chilling novel is the most recent entry in the growing school of literary cruelty that includes Dennis Cooper’s “Frisk” and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” Replete with graphic scenes of sexual assault, humiliation, ritualized murder, it provides further evidence that the novel of sexual violence may be replacing the novel of sexual passion. The object of desire has become the object of mutilation.

What sets these books apart from earlier explorations into lower depths is that their authors focus so intimately on a violent protagonist that they seem to want to become him. There is nothing redemptive nor admonitory, only a spooky lack of anger at violence. The result of this psychological slumming is a disturbing ambiguity of intent. Without illumination, these novels seem to justify the barbarities described. They flirt with the notion of sexual violence as ultimate experience. Yet by eroticizing brutality, they reveal a fear and hatred of sex that is repressive, puritanical. Desire must be punished.

These purportedly “realistic” books are so exaggerated in their specific obsessions that they end up like hallucinations, in Cooper’s case literally so. Paul Russell’s novel involves violent fairy tales: A boy, drugged, sings during harsh sex; two teen-age boys perform in a sadomasochistic movie while costumed in feathery angel wings!

Russell’s story is spare enough to glue together the violent passages. In Owen, Ky., 16-year-old Tony Blair is picked up by Carlos Reichart, director of supposedly avant-garde but more probably silly films; his latest is “Ur.” (A strongly implied association between Reichart and Andy Warhol, emphasized in publicity releases, is incorrect and outrageous.) Promised stardom, Tony travels to New York with Reichart, who abuses him in “real life” and as a performer in underground movies.

Several years later, Tony flees the city with a girl and lives a life of horrible banality. In Memphis, he stumbles upon a new Reichart movie, “Boys of Life,” which apparently squeezed past Tennessee censors. In the movie, Tony’s younger brother is sacrificed by Reichart. Suspecting real murder, Tony returns to confront the director. Inevitably, orgasm occurs simultaneously with violent death amid ecstatic moaning.

The novel is told by Tony after the events described are over. Repeatedly, he informs us that he still doesn’t understand much: “I don’t know why I thought that,” he muses. This limited introspection produces a drastic vagueness, dozens of “somehows” in place of motives, forced sudden realizations instead of insights, repetition instead of development. Tony isn’t sure he’s told us something, and proceeds to retell. Tony’s lapses or the author’s? The author’s. There is so much proselytizing and lax writing--reiterations, contradictions--that the book might be 100 pages shorter without loss.

Reichart expresses the ancient rationales for the vaunted joys of pain and cruelty, but the author joins his book earlier to those themes by dedicating his novel to director Pier Paolo Pasolini and artist Robert Mapplethorpe, celebrators of passionate violence. In further emphasis, the epigraph--from Fellini at his loftiest--extols cruelty when it is so “grand and total as to become innocent again.”

In one of many passages of exalted bombast, Reichart praises a boy encouraged to dig his own grave, bury himself and trust others there to dig him up: “With that kind of trust . . . you could fly.” When the boy, tortured, dies, Reichart rhapsodizes, “Even though he loved being alive, I think he was probably glad . . . not to have to go through being alive anymore.” Reichart attempts to extend his views about extremity into the areas of art, Nazi concentration camps, freedom fighters and AIDS. This results in further muddling, not in the intended elevation.

Russell expects us to believe that Tony would even implicitly absolve the man who may have killed his brother and who drugged other boys so they could cope with his filmed brutalization: “I know people talk about Reichart corrupting kids. . . . But speaking only for me . . . whatever was there for him to corrupt would’ve gotten corrupted anyway.” Perhaps. But this is spoken by the person who, on Page 1, identified Reichart as the man destined to ruin his life.

The novel contains powerful scenes that display Russell’s talent: a strangely dreamy encounter at dusk, while two boys on bicycles commit a mugging; a surrealistic scene on a roof with pigeons scattering. There are sudden insights: “Once life is finished it acquires a sense.” In a passage of spare lyricism, Tony recalls the aurora borealis of his childhood.

Every area of exploration must remain open to the artist. One may nevertheless point out that in a time of daily rapes and mutilations, murderous gangs and rampaging cops, the authors of these novels of cruelty become like witnesses who watch disaster with fascination, refuse involvement, and then proceed to describe--in loving detail--what they saw. Or fantasize what they saw.