Subcutaneous Physics : PARTICLES AND LUCK <i> By Louis B. Jones (Pantheon Books: $23; 306 pp.) </i>

Like Einstein, Mark Perdue is uncomfortable with the random and indeterminate character of modern particle physics. “God does not play dice with the universe,” Einstein complained of certain aspects of quantum theory, and sought for a more a more sweeping and unifying concept. Perdue, a tenured professor at 27, makes a similar complaint.

“All he did was keep trusting intuition,” Louis B. Jones writes in his engaging novelistic equivalent of a unified-field theory--in this case, a link between the human heart and the behavior of subatomic particles. “Keep asking that a particle be imaginable, keep asking that a particle exist in some human sense.” To which Perdue’s older colleagues, uneasy with his light mathematical grounding and his indifference to billion-dollar super-colliders, reply that his approach is mere metaphysics.

Jones’ own science may be more metaphysics than physics, but there is nothing meta about his fiction. The author of the witty “Ordinary Money” uses ideas to string his fiddle; what he plays are sentimental tunes. Sentimental as in sentiment, not sentimentality. We are always a little off-balance among the cogitations of Jones’ characters, but it is apparent that cogitating is their way of courting life. Cogito ergo amo.

We meet Mark Perdue one morning when Audrey, his wife of three weeks, cocks back her lean jogger’s legs and kicks him amiably out of bed. Brimming with energy, she is off to Los Angeles as one of the lawyers negotiating subsidiary rights--T-shirts and lunch-boxes--for a forthcoming Papal visit. Leaving Mark at loose ends.

It was four years earlier that he had written his celebrated physics paper. To the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle--at subatomic levels you can’t observe a phenomenon without changing it--he adds a corollary. You can’t name a phenomenon without changing it. Which is either a brilliant conceptual breakthrough or “mere metaphysics.”

Either way, it made him a tenured professor at an absurdly early age, a Nobel mentionable, and a scientific celebrity without any further need--as can happen with the pioneer physicists--of ever doing another bit of creative work.

It is an Angst -producing situation, and Mark is full of Angst . He carried “a certain sprained feeling in his chest all day.” It is not just because he may have passed his peak, but because he detests the peak he has passed. His proposition carries one step farther the immaterial and uncertain scientific view of the universe; the conclusion that at the fundamental building-block level--those particles--there is no such thing as palpable reality but only the statistical kind.

With Audrey to be absent until early the next morning, a classical farce situation is in place. The wife is away, the husband may play. Or, as it turns out, he may have his metaphysical crisis. Because Jones is Jones and not to be kept up with (his originality has its mentors, though: Updike, for marital and extramarital uxoriousness, Elkin for the comic nightmare of our civic life, Kundera for the marriage of philosophy and the flesh), he will do both.

One of the stops along Mark’s farcical 24-hour peripeteia is Shubie, the immensely nubile Iranian assistant in the physics department. She and Mark have exchanged hints and glances; she will be off the next day to take part in a financial confrontation involving her immensely rich exiled family. There is a farewell kiss, a melting, a hint that perhaps they will see each other that night. Mark staggers away, shaky and braced. “The air is different in the world of infidelity. It is clear.” It is a small nuclear happening though nothing comes of it. But it begins the alteration of his subatomic particles.

The main event in the long gaudy night of Mark’s soul, domestic geography and philosophical invigoration is detonated by an outburst not of lust but of wild fraternity. It is shared with a neighbor in the new upscale housing development where he and Audrey live.

Roger is Mark’s opposite. He is the owner of a failing pizza franchise and months behind in his house payments. He is helplessly in love with the wife who divorced him, remarried, is divorcing her second husband, studying anesthesiology and sleeping with her lab instructor. To bolster her second divorce case--all-fault, of course--she has slapped Roger with a restraining order forbidding him to come near her, even though she has him baby-sit their two children.

Roger is a passionate, shambling mess. Everything that Mark is good at, he is hopeless at. Yet by the end of their absurd nightlong sortie, Roger has emerged in a kind of comic splendor, and Mark’s particle alteration is far advanced.

Their adventure is set off by a letter from a property company asserting that it is establishing title, by the common-law doctrine of adverse possession--never mind what that is; like much else in the book, and in particle physics, it is absurd but true--to the land on which their houses stand. Pulling Mark along in his churning wake, Roger charges in all directions at once. They see a lawyer who carries a noncommittal professional stance to the point of black comedy. They stake out the property bounds using rope, fence-posts, football pennants and an enormous roll of turf. They have a hilarious confrontation with the property-company agent, who uses laser light to mark out his own bounds, and ends up eating Roger’s version of a cook-out: a frozen block of hamburger that he burns and scrapes off, layer by layer.

They encounter the police, who amiably talk sports with Roger even while carrying out a court order to pile his furniture outdoors. They encounter Roger’s wife, who turns out to be genuinely lovable despite the havoc caused by her hare-brained ventures in self-fulfillment. They encounter Roger’s two little children whose need for cuddling wars comically and touchingly with their schooled wariness of sexual abuse. The five-year old boy, whose stepfather has indoctrinated him with fashionable attitudes, wanders about reciting his mantra: “I like to keep myself clean. It’s okay for me to touch myself. I can be free and natural with my penis.”

There is a great deal more. Jones is writing domestic farce and social satire with great success. His characters are innocent at heart and befuddled of mind; and they are given a radioactive, high-speed particle energy by the steady ticking of Mark’s cogitations. At the end, when he climbs into bed with Audrey, calmly back from her T-shirt negotiations with the Vatican lawyers, he has made a breakthrough. He has found a human clue to the subatomic universe. How good a clue it is I can’t really say; it is too complicated to summarize here. I suppose that Jones has not revolutionized contemporary physics. But he has opened a chink in the wall that separates it from most of us, while writing a lovely and invigorating novel.