BOOK REVIEW : The Rise and Fall of Counterculture’s Jester : ABBIE HOFFMAN: American Rebel, by Marty Jezer , Rutgers $22.95; 327 pages

The court jester of the counterculture, Abbie Hoffman, showered the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills, performed an exorcism at the Pentagon and put up a pig as a presidential candidate in the 1968 elections. And yet he died by his own hand, burned-out and broken, the victim of a mental illness that may have prompted his merry pranks in the first place.

The skyrocket trajectory of Abbie Hoffman’s life, starting as a Jewish kid from the suburbs and ending as a cracked icon of the ‘60s, is charted by Marty Jezer in “Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel,” a sympathetic but curiously aloof biography of the man who fashioned radical politics into a kind of art form.

“Abbie starred in his own political theater; he helped invent . . . what is now all too pretentiously called ‘performance art,’ ” writes Jezer. “His theater was for the street, however. Unlike today’s activists, what he risked by inciting controversy was not a loss of federal funding but years in federal jail.”

Jezer was a cohort of Abbie Hoffman, and he does not pretend to be a dispassionate biographer: “I loved Abbie,” he writes, “for his courage, his humor and his imagination.” And yet, despite his efforts to conjure up the real Abbie Hoffman, Jezer does not really succeed in showing us what lay behind the mask of comedy that Hoffman invariably presented to the world.

A middle-class kid who fancied himself a misfit, Hoffman grew up in Worcester, Mass. His formative influences, according to Jezer, included the Marx Brothers and Mad magazine, Lenny Bruce and Abraham Maslow, “Broken Arrow” and “The Wild One.”

Hoffman studied psychology at Brandeis and UC Berkeley, but a more crucial experience was his work as a salesman for a pharmaceutical company. He was always the master pitchman: “I get a million ideas a minute,” he told his wife, Anita.

Radical politics turned out to be a kind of drug for Abbie Hoffman, and he got hooked as a demonstrator at Berkeley, a civil rights worker in the South, a food bank organizer in New York City. By 1968, when the counterculture reached its high-water mark, he was one of its self-created superstars.

“I need the movement,” Hoffman wrote. “I need it as much as I need oxygen to breathe.”

Hoffman’s real genius, as Jezer shows us, was his ability to hot-wire all the cultural and political strands of the ‘60s--anti-war activists, black militants, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) radicals, hippies, druggies and rockers--into what only later came to be understood as a single phenomenon called the counterculture.

“I live in the Woodstock Nation,” he announced from the witness stand at the trial of the Chicago Seven, where he stood accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

“It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind in the same way the Sioux Indians carried the Sioux nation around with them.”

Jezer, of course, is a veteran of “the Woodstock Nation,” and he livens up his narrative with war stories that remind us of what it was really like on the barricades. When the Yippies gathered in Chicago to nominate “Pigasus” for president, for example, a hot controversy arose: The pig that Abbie Hoffman had secured from a local farmer, insisted Jerry Rubin, was too damned cute.

“The politically correct pig, he argued, had to be big and ugly,” and so Hoffman went in search of another, less adorable porker.

Jezer concedes that Hoffman never sold out, which is high praise indeed from a radical in middle age, but neither did Hoffman quite succeed in making a revolution out of pranksterism. He continued to suffer from the ravages of what used to be called manic depression and is now known as bipolar disorder.

He fell afoul of the law when he tried to make a big score on a cocaine deal. He went underground for seven years, and when he finally emerged, he was a doomed man. On April 12, 1989, he took 150 barbiturates and washed them down with a swallow of booze.

Jezer takes his own politics too seriously to go all sloppy and sentimental on the subject of Hoffman’s suicide. (“Nostalgia,” as Abbie himself once said, “is a disease of middle age.”)

And so, while Jezer credits Hoffman for “his own keen moral sense and passion for justice,” he pronounces a sterner judgment on Hoffman’s failed notion of “politics as fun.”

“With his glib and giggly hedonism, Abbie made working for change sound too easy,” writes Jezer. “An instant high! No sacrifice! Instant gratification! Abbie had started out to organize . . . the hippie counterculture. In the balance, the hedonism and utopian grandiosity of counterculture politics disorganized him.”