BOOK REVIEW : An Oddly Bloodless Memoir of Gary Hart : THE GOOD FIGHT: The Education of an American Reformer <i> by Gary Hart</i> ; Random House $23, 312 pages

Gary Hart is the former Democratic senator from Colorado who ran for President and then ran afoul of his own sexual misadventures. He may have a colorful and provocative life story to tell, but you will not find it in his new book, “The Good Fight.”

Rather, Hart insists on giving us a weighty but oblique intellectual memoir that reveals almost nothing about the flesh-and-blood man who wrote it.

“The author . . . had the misfortune to become a pioneer of sorts in a late-20th-Century test by the American media of the outer limits of its authority to inquire into the private lives of public figures, if need be by surreptitious surveillance,” Hart writes with a characteristic blend of aloofness and petulance. “This book has been written as a brief against those who sought to trivialize the ideal of democratic reform by trivializing the author’s life.”

Hart pointedly insists on referring to himself in the third person: “The voice of the reformer in this book is a voice of reticence,” he writes. It’s a distancing technique that turns Hart--who was once a vivid figure on the political landscape--into a disembodied voice that utters weighty philosophical pronouncements from on high.

Hart wears the badge of a reformer, and he uses the phrase to an excess when referring to himself: “the young reformer,” “the angry reformer,” “the aging reformer.” Of course, if he deserves the title at all, it’s because of his work on behalf of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential campaign. And yet Hart dismisses “two years of backbreaking work” in a single glancing paragraph.

Hart occasionally tries to brighten up his magisterial prose with a flash of metaphorical lightning. At one point, for example, he describes his years in a Connecticut seminary as “a complex dual life, a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence within the cloistered seminary walls: inky-fingered theological note taker by day, literary vampire by night.” Politics, he seems to suggest, became a drug for his own spiritual afflictions.

“It was enough,” Hart writes, “to make a confused young man hunger for the comparative clarity to be found at the barricades of political reform.”

More often, though, “The Good Fight” tends to be mannered and overwritten. Even the insistent use of the third person, which Hart intended as a “a form of protest” against “today’s cult of narcissism,” is so coy and cloying that it becomes a form of egoism, as when Hart observes in passing that “Fritz Mondale and the reformer disagreed on many things.” And, now and then, Hart simply backs himself into rhetorical corners that bring the discourse to a dead-end.

“Byronic Kennedy may have been,” Hart writes at one point, “but of cynicism he would know something also.”

Hart depicts himself as a restless idealist, an earnest seeker after truth and justice, a young man “making his troubled odyssey from acolyte theologian to activist reformer,” and he works up some real passion when writing about the men whose ideas shaped his own values and political ambitions: John Wesley, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy and Jefferson. And Hart still holds out the hope of a messianic era of American political reform.

“The political Establishment’s old ideas and dead weight of inertia are being subverted by a changing environment,” declares Hart. “All that popular majorities lack is a giant reform hero of Rooseveltian proportions . . . who will challenge them to cross the statistic barricades of the status quo.”

A note of longing can be detected in Hart’s call for a heroic reformer. Still, he appears to concede that his own career is characterized “by personal and political failures.” But do not bother to look for the bloody details of those failures. The reader will find more biographical detail in a thumbnail entry in “Who’s Who” than in all of “The Good Fight.”

“What a long, strange trip it’s been,” Hart sums up, as if to reassure us that his cultural milieu includes Jerry Garcia as well as Soren Kierkegaard. But the only strangeness to be found in his book is the cold and impassive mask behind which Hart hides himself. Indeed, he seems to acknowledge that he has concealed more than he has revealed in “The Good Fight,” and he goes so far as to apologize to his own editor, Jonathan Karp.

“It is not exactly the book he originally imagined,” Hart writes, still crouching inside the third person. “Out of great respect for him, the author should also write that book someday.”