The Apple Never Falls Far Enough From the Tree : THE PLAGIARIST <i> By Benjamin Cheever (Atheneum: $20; 322 pp.)</i>

There are few experiences quite so enduringly wretched as being born the son of a famous father. Benjamin Cheever may be the first novelist to capture this condition accurately in print. His wry, sad, finely-crafted first novel, “The Plagiarist,” is the story of Arthur Prentice, a timid young man who “loves words,” and his relationship with his father, Icarus Prentice, who resembles Cheever’s own well-known father in his excessive drinking, rapier wit and reputation as the preeminent writer of American short stories.

Arthur is unhappily married to Faith, his high school sweetheart, a buxom, controlling ex-cheerleader with an eating disorder. Now that she has borne him a son, a sad little boy named Nathan, she forces her husband to sleep in the sewing room. In an attempt to win her respect as well as his own, Arthur quits his low-paying job on a small-town newspaper for a lucrative position at the American Reader, a magazine very much like Reader’s Digest. There he ascends rapidly under the tutelage of James Horster III, the deputy editor and chief, a religious fundamentalist and anti-smoking crusader who wears his hair in a Duck’s Ass, “a style that had been popular in the 1950s among those considering a career at the local Texaco.”

During Arthur’s rise, he befriends and betrays colleagues, has an affair with a sympathetic and lovely female editor, loses his father, and finally, perhaps, discovers his own self-esteem and integrity.

Arthur’s deliverance is facilitated by the novel’s most engaging device, an article Horster wants Arthur to persuade Icarus to write for them. Something upbeat about cats. When Icarus, who loathes the platitudinous prose of the magazine, refuses to oblige, Arthur takes it upon himself to compose the piece. It comes to him full-blown, or nearly, in the wee hours of the morning, like a Blakean vision: the tale of Edgar Allen Polecat. We are treated to an evilly amusing parody of what might have actually been penned had John Cheever written an upbeat cat story for Reader’s Digest.

Do all sons dream of “ghosting” a work for their fathers, fooling the public, and thereby proving that they are the equals of the great men? The fantasy has certainly occurred to this reviewer. Icarus plays the accomplice by agreeing to lend his name to it. Perhaps it is a fantasy of the fathers too.

Icarus Prentice is the best-wrought character in the book (although how a Westchester WASP gets a Greek name is beyond me). He is witty, dry, quick with an aphorism (he refers to his housekeeper as his “faux wife”), devastating in his misogyny (“my passage into adulthood would have been easier had I known from the beginning that heterosexual love is a species of mortal combat”) and alternately kind and vicious to his son, the two attitudes often flipping so quickly that they blur together like the pictures in a nickelodeon. Arthur has developed a scrupulously honest, yet subtly mocking manner of dealing with him. Watching the two of them spar, we see how learning to deal with a father can pollute every part of a son’s life.

There is a mother too, but she is a will-o-the-wisp, a phantom. The author seems afraid to examine her too closely. Despite some glib explanations, we never truly understand why his masturbatory fantasies all feature women being murdered. The author’s disarming frankness and high literary tone (his dream victims include Romeo’s beloved and the decapitated Lady de Winter of “The Three Musketeers”) save these passages from prurience.

This reviewer, who shares the curse of famous patrimony with author and Arthur, felt a dizzying sense of deeja vu while reading “The Plagiarist.” The following excerpt, where a friend offers Arthur some helpful advice for improving his newspaper column, seemed a familiar refrain:

“Well, if you ever had any trouble, you could always ask your father for help. Have him cover a town board meeting for you once or twice,” he said. “I bet that would put your editor on his ear.”

And this passage, where Arthur confides in his father:

“ ‘(S)ometimes I’ll mention that you’re my father, when it doesn’t really need to come up. Then they’ll treat me with more respect, but finally they find out it’s me. Then they’re disappointed.’

“Icarus nodded.

“ ‘And a lot of people call me Icarus,’ said Arthur. ‘Icarus and Arthur don’t even sound alike, but if they’re asking me a question about books, they’ll forget themselves and call me Icarus.’ ”

American Reader magazine provides the perfect setting for this little gem of a story. Like Arthur, the magazine is a plagiarist and a deceiver, condensing articles from other sources and manufacturing articles of its own to place in other magazines so they can be “found” and used by American Reader. The editorial staff is a rogues’ gallery of eccentrics, erudite men of letters who spend their time rationalizing editing a magazine for illiterates.

Only in the novel’s last few pages would this reviewer find fault. After Icarus’ death, Arthur undergoes a personality change, a “worm turns” transformation common to popular entertainment, and so emotionally satisfying that we are reluctant to admit that it does not exist in real life. Liberated by his father’s death, Arthur wreaks elegantly appropriate vengeance on Horster, walks away from a job that offers fabulous salary and benefits, cures his wife’s eating disorder and makes her toe the line. And by the way, she’s pregnant.

It’s nearly as upbeat as Edgar Allen Polecat.