A Novel in Trapdoors : LEVIATHAN, <i> By Paul Auster (Viking: $21; 275 pp.)</i>

Only a courageous and confident novelist takes the kind of chance Paul Auster takes in “Leviathan,” his seventh novel. On the very first page, he unveils the climax of his story. The rest of the book is spent explaining how we got to that shattering beginning.

The novel opens: “Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. There were no witnesses, but it appears that he was sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off.” By Page 3, we know that this exploded man is Benjamin Sachs, our narrator’s best friend, and we know that our narrator (a novelist called Peter Aaron) knows the whole story of Sachs’ long strange trip to that Wisconsin roadside. The FBI comes calling, asking questions. But Peter’s not talking. Not yet. He will explain it all to us, yes--eventually, in his own good time, in the pages on the novel we are reading.

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez pulled off this sort of wizardry in “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” and John Irving got away with it clean in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” Paul Auster almost gets away with it, too--but then we catch a glimpse of the Wizard over there behind the curtain, furiously working the knobs and levers of his metafiction, and it distracts our attention from the spectacle we are intended to see.

The story is brisk and compelling, and (to use the publisher’s buzzword) more “accessible” than Auster’s previous work, which includes “City of Glass” and “The Music of Chance.” The dead Ben Sachs and the living Peter Aaron have been fellow writers, bosom buddies in the 15 years since their first meeting. We’ve all met someone like Sachs, someone thin and strange with wild hair and beard, and plenty of white-hot opinions that lead him into trouble. “There is no question that he cut an odd figure,” Peter tells us, “towering there in his moth-eaten coat with a New York Knicks baseball cap perched on his head, and a navy blue scarf wrapped around the cap to protect his ears. . . . He looked like someone with a bad toothache, I thought, or else like some half-starved Russian soldier stranded on the outskirts of Stalingrad.”

In fact, Peter tells us, Ben Sachs is a writer of no little brilliance. He wrote his first (sprawling, historical) novel while in prison for refusing the draft in 1968, and has since churned out “all kinds of essays and articles on a countless variety of subjects.” (Since not a line of Sachs’ prose is quoted in “Leviathan,” the reader must take Peter’s word on the subject of his literary brilliance.)

One night, in the midst of a fireworks display celebrating the Statue of Liberty’s centenary, Sachs takes a four-story tumble from a fire escape. He survives but is transformed: “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life rolling pieces of blank paper into a typewriter,” he declares. “I want to stand up from my desk and do something.”

This accident becomes the novel’s central metaphor, and the action moves outward from that point in ever-expanding circles of symbol and memory: statues with torches upraised, desperate falls, torrid explosions of violence, and sexual fireworks. Reading this book is rather like falling through a succession of trapdoors, each deceptive moment of stillness opening up to another precipitous tumble.

Sachs’ journey toward radical action becomes intertwined with the lives and affairs of a cast of characters including one Reed Dimaggio, member of a radical environmental group called “Children of the Planet.” Sachs becomes a shadow, a kind of intellectual Ghost Rider, “a symptom of (Peter’s) ignorance about all things, an emblem of the unknowable itself.”

When a character becomes a “symptom” and an “emblem,” we feel the ground berneath the story trembling, but Auster’s powerful narrative engine keeps us reading and rushing toward a breathless conclusion, in which the manuscript of a novel called “Leviathan” figures prominently.

The strength of the author’s storytelling skills, the detective-story structure and the painstaking blending of fact and fiction help keep us on track. But Auster has not abandoned his post-Borges-modernist bag of identity tricks, role-switches, reader-deception, withheld information, and novelists who figure as characters in their own novels. All these devices are cleverly handled, but ultimately work against our immersion in the story. At crucial moments, the author reminds us that we are reading a novel. Characters open their mouths and Authorspeak comes out. But the intelligence and agility of the author’s voice shines through, largely redeeming these missteps. In the end, “Leviathan” feels less a work of imagination than an unusually artful telling of a complex truth, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.