Victims of Love : GOLDMAN’S ANATOMY, <i> By Glenn Savan (Doubleday: $22; 321 pp.)</i>

The term long-awaited gets misused and abused, mostly by folks in Public Relations, but once in awhile it’s appropriate, and this is one of those times.

The author of “White Palace” is back.

In 1987, Glenn Savan’s first novel appeared in bookstores as part of a new publishing phenom: fiction by very young authors, issued in trade paperback, all vying to duplicate the unexpected success of Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City.” Sexy and well-written, “White Palace” was one of the books that deservedly rose from the racks to gain Savan national attention (and to get made into a movie).

So, after six years, Savan’s second novel, “Goldman’s Anatomy,” really has been long-awaited, and it is a pleasure to report that it’s been worth it: This book is even more assured, and fulfills the promise of the first without covering the same territory.

Well, maybe just a little of the same territory. In “White Palace,” a proper young ad exec, Max, took up with a frumpy, older waitress, Nora, whose notions of housekeeping included stuffing half-eaten bags of pork rinds behind her fold-out couch. Max and Nora were both completely puzzled by their mutual lust, and yet managed to salvage real love from the rubble of their outrageous differences. Savan’s book asked: What makes someone lovable, and what makes love real?

In “Goldman’s Anatomy,” some very different characters wrestle with similar dilemmas. Arnie Goldman, the protagonist (if not exactly the hero) of the title, is a gem dealer and collector, a 25-year-old partially crippled by rheumatoid arthritis since the age of 9. Arnie has adjusted fairly well to life on crutches, but he hasn’t exactly found it a self-esteem builder, at least not where women are concerned. In his own words, he’s been “consigned to the sidelines of the sexual game.” His mother encourages him to become involved with social groups geared for the “physically challenged,” but not only does Arnie object to the euphemism (“Why can’t these mealy-mouthed jerks in their PR departments ever just call a cripple a cripple?”), he believes that he can eventually make enough money at his gem dealing to win the heart of a non -”physically challenged” woman. Meanwhile, he lives a solitary life, with mostly his rocks for company.

One day everything changes. Arnie is visited by Redso Wolff and Redso’s lover, Billy Rubin. Back in high school, when the popular and rebellious Redso (nicknamed for his carrot-colored hair) was “the Jean Genet of Central High,” he miraculously befriended Arnie, the class gimp. Now, after a brief stint at Carnegie Mellon, Redso has dropped out to return as a souped-up version of himself: Hard-drinking and underweight, he’s restless, sexually compulsive and convinced he’s about to write a brilliant play.

Billy, his girlfriend, is a dark beauty, a skilled cook and a passionate lover who can fix an air conditioner or patch a roof, and who plays Monopoly like Donald Trump.

It follows as Arnie’s crutches follow Arnie that he becomes immediately smitten with Billy. He sees the hopelessness of his longing: “Look at . . . poor Quasimodo, forever slobbering after his gypsy girl.”

Arnie lets Redso move in with him; the motive he barely hides from himself is his desire to have the beautiful Billy around as part of the package. Unfortunately for Arnie, Billy remains singularly devoted to Redso, even as Redso’s hyperness increases dramatically. What makes Redso hard to live with, though, isn’t so much that hyperness--it isn’t even his disregard for others’ possessions (he loves to disappear with Arnie’s car)--it’s his relentless, ugly hostility (“Jerk off an extra time for me,” he taunts Arnie).

After Redso baits Billy’s father (an Orthodox rabbi who is himself a bit of a nut-case, to put it in layman’s terms) by posing as a devout Jew, Arnie and Billy can no longer avoid the truth: Redso is in the manic phase of manic depression.

From that moment on, the threesome are joined in a vicious, unbreakable triangle. Billy takes care of Redso, while besotted Arnie takes care of Billy. Arnie tries to tell Billy that she’s wasting her love on a madman who chooses to be mad: “Redso’s still a human being, and he’s still in charge of his free will--and boy, does he exploit it to the maximum! . . . He’s worse than crazy. He’s dead set against being sane .” To which Billy retorts: “He doesn’t want to be sane because he’s crazy.”

Arnie is equally trapped. He knows that he should move out, “leave the two of them to their mutual clinging crazy impossible fates,” but “the truth was, I was paralyzed.”

“Goldman’s Anatomy” is a fascinating study of this kind of paralysis; of madness and co-dependency, but mostly of love. As in “White Palace,” Savan asks, why do we love someone? Because of who they are or who they could be? Because we need them, or because they need us? Or just because they’re there? You might say it’s a hip, funny version of Flannery O’Connor’s “Ballad of the Sad Cafe.”

Part of Savan’s deftness lies in making us sympathize with Arnie, even though he’s not much better than Redso: He not only covets his best friend’s lover, he lies to her, later even betrays her trust in a fairly despicable way. And unlike Redso, he doesn’t have insanity as a defense. But as the narrator of the story, Arnie is able to gloss over his own mistakes and present himself as the stoic survivor of personal misfortune (which, of course, he is), as well as a victim of love (which, of course, he also is).

Savan also gives us two hilarious characters in Billy’s self-absorbed, hypochondriac brother, Frank, whom Billy compares to Raskolnikov, and her father, the bossy and boastful Rabbi Rubin.

The parallel between Billy’s relationship to her grandiose father and to Redso is one of a few bits of heavy-handedness that isn’t exactly minimized by having the characters point it out to us more than once. Savan also commits a few sins of implausibility; for example, when Arnie leaves Billy and the already certified Redso alone with a rock collection worth thousands of dollars, and then is shocked and dismayed to find that Redso has hocked some of them during a manic episode.

It’s also faintly disappointing when Savan succumbs to an old myth and gives Redso a choice between madness and an uncreative, bourgeois life. But then, as Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy might have said, “Damn it, readers, I’m a storyteller, not a psychologist!”

Lucky us.