An Autopsy of a Generation : THE GARDEN NEXT DOOR <i> By Jose Donoso</i> , <i> (Grove Press: $18.95; 250 pp.) </i>

They sag with failure, are in their fifties, and live as exiles trapped in Spain with no money and no future. They possess but one asset-their pasts. Julio and Gloria fled Chile after Allende’s fall. Julio had been a university professor of English literature, the author of two promising books, the son of a congressman, and she had been raised to be the proper wife of a professional man.

In Chilean Jose Donoso’s bitter-sweet novel “The Garden Next Door” this does not prove to be sufficient material for starting a new life. Or even remembering their past lives. Julio struggles to rewrite a massive novel which pivots on his six days of incarceration in one of Pinochet’s prisons. An earlier version of his tale had been rejected by Spain’s leading agent as lifeless. Now he suspects he will be a flop, a drop-out from the Boom generation of Latin American writers. Their teen-age son despises them for their fixation on the failed left government of Allende and has disappeared into Marrakech. They wonder if he is now a male whore. Julio’s mother is dying in Chile and he lacks both the money and the will to visit her deathbed. Then, a rich friend offers them his luxurious apartment in Madrid for the summer and they grasp desperately at this opportunity.

The flat in Madrid looks down on the lush garden of a neighboring Duke and this green sanctuary becomes a metaphor for a lost Chile, for a dead marriage, for lives either in decline, or possibly never truly lived. “Why not accept failure once and for all?” Julio thinks. “I have nothing to say. Nothing to teach. I can’t create beauty, but I know how to appreciate it.” So Julio proceeds to drink the summer away, swallow valiums and putter at his novel. Gloria slides into a mental breakdown. This mutual descent is punctuated by experiences with characters seemingly more alive: the aristocratic woman next door in the garden who takes lovers easily and moves gracefully in her nakedness by the pool; a vagabond friend of their son named Bijou who is a male prostitute, thief, peddler of drugs and resolutely apolitical; a famous Ecuadoran writer who ostentatiously enjoys the rewards of his fame.

Donoso’s book moves by images more than actions and the images all conjure up the emptiness of modern life-”From the terrace above we could see the reddish sky . . . with its festive summer lights: international jazz or horror film festival?” Solutions are systematically rejected: youth culture proves an empty mannerism; literature is both unreachable and unreal; politics are bankrupt; the flesh a fraud betrayed by age; personal integrity a fantasy that cannot be sustained without status and money. Julio and Gloria cling to memories of favorites snatches of classical music which they hum almost as prayers as they confront a world in which they no longer have a place. Donoso, born in 1924 and a leading member of the South American crop of writers called the boom generation, operates as a pathologist performing his generation’s own autopsy. He writes very deftly and yet coldly. The novel has a clinical, morning after feel to it.

Julio ends his summer a total failure, just as the garden next door goes to temporary ruin during the August holiday of the aristocratic family. His revised novel is scorned by every major house in Spain and so he steals to taste the rewards of a success he has not achieved. Gloria utterly breaks down. The memories of Allende’s fall prove inadequate for either fiction or a life. “I’ll be the one,” Julio decides, “for whom revolutions will catch fire, yet not the one who commits himself to fight or defend the rights of others with his blood. No: I’ll remain outside the struggle and outside history.”

In almost a wicked sendup of both magical realism and pulp fiction, all is made right in the end and Julio and Gloria are either restored to their proper standing, or-depending on the reader’s point of view-condemned to their limited lives. Money and station descend, classical music once again seems to correctly express the actual world. The plot hardly matters in a book that insists history does not matter, a novel which ends with the injunction, “Please do not disturb!” This is not the book for Fidel Castro or Ronald Reagan but it seems appropriate for this weary moment at the end of a bloody century.