The Moral Dilemma of Americans Abroad : Books: Inspired by the works of Joseph Conrad, a first-time novelist re-examines the notion of white man as intruder in his dense tale of Third World politics.

Sort-of fresh air drifted into Bob Shacochis’ room at the Century Plaza through terrace doors propped open by his love for cigarettes. His laptop lay at the ready on a table nearby, evidence that only moments before he’d been dissecting his 17-year sojourn with a woman known as Catfish--Miss Fish on second reference. His T-shirt blared the words Bad Behavior , the kind of giddy legend that made all 41 years of him erupt into giggles.

Not exactly your typical CIA agent, no?

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Hey, CIA guy. I’m gonna hurt you. You’re in trouble. Get out of my country.

Years and years ago, people would say that to Shacochis, even though he was nothing more insidious than a Peace Corps volunteer posted to the Caribbean. He would wander the streets of St. Vincent, his heart filled with good intentions, his ears with swill meant for someone else, some other White Male Intruder.

The “dab in the Caribbean” where such scenes played out took shape in Shacochis’ imagination as St. Catherine, the fictional backdrop of his long-awaited first novel, “Swimming in the Volcano.” His dense tale of Third World politics and fever-dream romance has some critics rushing to compare him to such expatriate writers as Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad.

Shacochis, too, frankly claims Conrad as his aesthetic forebear. But in these post-Vietnam, post-Allende days, playing the imperialistic white male ain’t what it used to be. Indeed, Shacochis’ protagonist, Mitchell Wilson, an agricultural economist deployed to St. Catherine, is far from the instigator of events. When Wilson’s former girlfriend, a beguiling cocaine addict with a spurious past, returns to reclaim him, Wilson finds himself swept up in a maelstrom of island politics and random violence.

“The people who chronicled colonialism at the turn of the century--E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Conrad--had everything to do with the ultimate subversion of colonialism and the change of attitudes in the world,” says Shacochis, who’s based in Tallahassee, Fla. “All those books slowly were a sensitizing agent, and now this is the next step in that tradition, or I hope that it is.”

In “Swimming in the Volcano,” Shacochis often sheds the white male perspective, climbing into the skins of a bounteous woman from Kansas working in St. Catherine as a Peace Corps volunteer and a sociopathic black policeman. Shacochis experimented with different voices in both his first collection of short stories, “Easy in the Islands,” which won the American Book Award for First Fiction in 1985, and his subsequent collection, “The Next New World,” which captured the Prix de Rome.

That Babel-like tendency for white male authors to imagine life as The Other aligns Shacochis with such contemporary writers as Norman Rush and Richard Price. He says it’s the inevitable literary reflection of a changing world.

“We’re a multiracial, multiethnic community in a way we’ve never been before, and white men have had to shed their traditional power, and they’ve had to accommodate different points of view that they always disdained before,” he says.

“If you want to frame it in literary terms, it’s ‘The Heart of Darkness’ come ashore. You don’t have to go to Africa anymore to have that ‘Mojo’ experience because it’s here.”

Still, Shacochis’ willingness to play the artistic chameleon has also gotten him into trouble among some academic and literary critics. Some women in Tobias Wolff’s writing class at Syracuse University were up in arms over a Shacochis short story told by a bullied woman. And Shacochis himself has described some of his work as “sociologically audacious.”

“I reserve the right to make a luxurious statement like that, which is a self-reflective statement. Anybody who wants to get into an ideological battle about it, I’m more than willing to fight. I think what they’re trying to do is assassinate the imagination, number one, and number two, they’re trying to absolutely neuter whatever it is in a human being that evolves a sense of empathy and compassion for somebody else who is not like them. That would be the death of art and literature.”

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Shacochis never thought of himself as an aspiring keeper of the flame when he was growing up in McLean, Va. His Navy bureaucrat father failed to see the difference between being an artist and “a bum’s life. There’s no structure to it. You don’t go to an office. You don’t have a paycheck.”

Shacochis fortified himself for the closest respectable job he could think of--he studied journalism at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he flunked feature writing. “They were training the infantry of journalism,” he says. “They hated me in journalism school.”

Then in 1973, he made his first foray into the Caribbean, spending a year on an island off Nicaragua diving for turtle and grouper. He returned three years later as an agricultural journalist for the Peace Corps, ambivalently casting his lot with the government at a particularly virulent time for Americans abroad.

“The last thing I ever wanted to represent in my adult life was my government overseas,” he says. “Because as much as I love America, American foreign policy in my adult life has made me ashamed, frankly.”

What’s more, bizarre things started happening. Someone broke into Shacochis’ home one night and accosted him with a diving knife. A friend died trying to hop a train. He got robbed. He got sick. He got out.

The couple of years Shacochis spent in the Caribbean have blurred somewhat in his mind, and he calls the region more of “a literary landscape.” He explored that territory at large in Florida, back at the University of Missouri and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The work was published as “Easy in the Islands.”

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The triumph of Shacochis’ debut collection eased the way for his nonfiction. Magazines such as Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly came knocking, and Shacochis began to write a column for Gentleman’s Quarterly. In February, Scribner’s will publish a collection of columns titled “Domesticity,” examining his 17 years with Miss Fish and expose the flip side of his wanderlust.

“Usually it’s guys sitting in the newsroom saying, ‘I gotta get outta here and write a novel.’ And for a long time, there it was me writing short stories and a novel, saying, ‘I gotta get out of here and do some journalism.’ ”

But some of the fruits of success have had a nasty taste. The prestigious Prix de Rome supported Shacochis so he could write in Rome in 1989-90--which turned out to be nightmarish. The American Academy in Rome housed him and his wife, Miss Fish (a.k.a. Barbara Anne Petersen), in tight dorm quarters with no heat and unreliable electricity. “It was the worst living and working conditions in my entire life,” he says, “and I have really been out there.”

After Shacochis complained, the prize was revoked for a year so the terms could be renegotiated--a gap that did not make Shacochis popular with some of his colleagues.

He has also come under fire from some critics for the sheer unwieldiness of his first novel, nine years in the making. Entertainment Weekly chastised him for it, saying, “At 518 pages . . . Shacochis over-calibrates everyone’s consciousness.” But the Los Angeles Times said “Swimming” was “worth the effort,” and the Chicago Tribune critic called it “the finest first novel I have read in many years.”

“Swimming” examines the moral ambiguity inherent in being an American abroad.

“I really think America has become the victim of its own good intentions . . . the victims of our own naivete and altruistic arrogance and the belief that we had the right answers for everybody else in the world because we had the best country going.

“There’s a line in the book where Mitchell Wilson is recalling what Henry Adams said about Robert E. Lee at the end of the Civil War--to paraphrase, sometimes it’s the good men among us who do the most harm in the world. I’m fascinated by that dynamic. How could you be good and cause so much trouble? Is it better to be bad? Is Realpolitik the better decision than the principled decision?”

Call Shacochis a literary subversive, albeit one who has captured some of publishing’s choicer laurels. For all its breadth, “Swimming” only touches off a trilogy, and in November, Shacochis signed a $250,000 contract for “Domesticity” and the second work in the trilogy, “The Magnificence of Everything That Burns.” The second part will grant Wilson a 10-year-old daughter and trace them from Virginia to Argentina and the Vatican. The third book, “Liberty,” will bring back Bobby Fernandez, the Cuban drug dealer of “Swimming,” and examine Cuba’s uneasy alliance with trafficking.

Shacochis may have a taste for the hot soup of moral dilemmas, but don’t look to him for answers. “I’m really exploring and trying to give an aesthetic context or shape to the exploration. I’m not an especially wise man. I’m not young enough to know everything anymore.”