Fallen Angels : SHE NEEDED ME, <i> By Walter Kirn (Pocket Books: $20; 227 pp.)</i>

The premise alone was enough to make me want to read Walter Kirn’s new novel “She Needed Me,” the premise and the memory of reading his dazzling debut short-story collection not too long ago.

In “She Needed Me,” born-again right-to-lifer Weaver Walquist meets pregnant greeting- card artist Kim Lindgren outside an abortion clinic in St Paul. “The girl was standing up, about to walk inside,” the book’s first lines tell us, “I was in front of her, lying down.” When Weaver tells Kim that he can help her, the he means they , he and his fellow members of the “Conscience Squad.” But as a full- scale riot breaks out among the demonstrators in front of the clinic, Kim calls Weaver on his safely disembodied rhetoric, saying “ You said you’d help me,” and Weaver does help her, and their adventure together begins.

In spite of Kirn’s effective rendering of Kim and the other characters--psychotic, born-again ringleader Lucas Boone; Kim’s flaccid and mildly evil parents Chuck and Dixie; Weaver’s tall, irreverent and emotionally unavailable mother Margaret--”She Needed Me” is Weaver’s story, from first to last. Driven from drugs to religion in an attempt to find “something in the universe at least as big as his mother,” young Weaver is gentle, misguided and convincingly paralyzed by the fear of letting anyone into his life. When he meets Kim, he knows it will be much safer to “save her” than to fall in love with her, but by the novel’s end he has more or less successfully done both.

But this is not a simple love story. Kirn allows Weaver to be by turns heroic and inadequate, both morally bankrupt and surprisingly humane. We are privy to his fears and failures, and most significantly to his observations of women, which are insightful, unpredictable and above all honest. “It had been years since a girl had cooked me dinner,” Kirn writes in an early chapter, “and the simple things women do in the kitchen struck me after so much time as almost too fresh and vivid to bear.”

Weaver’s thoughts on women reveal him as a complicated narrator: one moment generous, the next ambivalent, even sinister. Toward the middle of the novel, when Weaver is no longer able to image away his erections by picturing Christ’s wounds as he hung on the cross, he thinks “Two years in the Lord is no time at all: you can slip in an instant. A woman can make you. And then you are part of her again, a nothing, and you may as well not have been born. You may as well not have left the darkness.”

Kirn’s writing is at its best when Weaver is most frightened: Hell, Weaver fears, is “also, a beautiful woman. To bow before, to touch. To frighten you and excite you, over and over until you just dissolved.” But Weaver’s relationship with women is not all darkness; he can be both accurate--”The moment a woman feels truly beautiful, she wants to stay that way and never move”--and compassionate--”I knew that, sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own drowning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.” It is in Weaver’s expanding knowledge of Kim that his own transformation is reflected.

Weaver’s observations are charming, endearing, and complicated enough to be a little frightening. In fact, what I admire most about Kirn’s book is his refusal to sacrifice complexity of subject matter for any reason: making his character more sympathetic, pleasing the politically correct, or achieving some kind of closure among them. There is nothing simple about abortion, no matter who is telling the story; nothing black and white about religion, about drugs, or about the fear of aloneness/togetherness that flip- flops across our psyches like an M. C. Escher drawing, and Kirn allows us our whole range of feelings, conflicted though they may be, on all of these subjects.

There are places, early in the book, where I think these characters are too improbable. There are moments when I can see daylight between Weaver and the author, when the author seems to stand in judgment of his first-person narrator, where the characters become, if only for a minute, some kind of grotesque cartoon. But Kirn writes toward complication and truth, rather than away from it, and wins me over entirely by the time the couple start their pilgrimage to North Dakota, where Weaver tries to break apart his multilayered bubble (so many layers it’s hard to tell when he’s advancing or receding) and to fall in love.

I am won over by Weaver’s helplessness, his wonder and respect for even a less-than-perfect woman, and most of all by his lack of cynicism and bitterness in a world that has dealt him one hard bargain after the next. Weaver loves Kim, and his quiet understanding of the power, the malleability, the mystery and finally the limitations of his own love become the process and progress of the book.

I am so won over, in fact, by Weaver’s progress that I am able to forgive, and in moments even embrace, the book’s problematic ending, which, by not pushing hard enough toward resolution, upholds the novel’s realistic tendencies even as it disappoints the reader’s narrative desires. Here the text becomes a metaphor for the relationship, and like Weaver’s theory about sex without penetration, we are indeed satisfied, but not in every way.

“I wanted to leap from one shore, faith, where it was dry and solid and safe,” Weaver says, “onto the other shore, ultimate sin, where we would sink down together into Hell, and be fallen angels together, with horns.” Likewise I, as reader, wanted to give myself up to a novel that would leave me, finally, unmercifully wrenched or unsurpassingly joyful. That “She Needed Me” refuses to do either is, while frustrating, quite possibly a measure of the novel’s own truthfulness, and therefore, of its ultimate artistic success.