Love in the Trenches : CONJUGAL BLISS: A Comedy of the Martial Arts, <i> By John Nichols (Henry Holt: $22.50; 304 pp.)</i>

John Nichols’ new novel bears the fortunate subtitle, “A Comedy of the Martial Arts” (with a transposition mark in “Martial” between the “t” and the “i”), and this wordplay is a kind of truth in advertising for this novel is a broad marital comedy and it is full of the kind of play and sense of humor that we know is the often the true sense in his work. Nichols, who has treated politics and the environment and the obvious ironies of our social order with his ebullient, sometimes zany wit in his other novels, takes on marriage here, specifically the ill-fated matrimonial tempest of Roger and Zelda.

Roger, a moderately successful science fiction writer, was moderately happy in his laid back bachelorhood. He had a series of lovers, (longstanding relationships really), an ex wife, a dog, two grown children, a gang of friends, a resident spider (Big Al), a book and screen contract, in other words, a life. He’s a nice guy who actually tells us he thinks life is a bowl of cherries. Into this bowl comes Zelda, a woman we come to see who has no particular propinquity to moderation. Her physical attributes--which are catalogued at every opportunity in this rambunctious, episodic story (and which are frequently accompanied by stimulating footwear)--seem to be the libidinous manager that unmoor lusty Roger, leading him to abandon his carefree days and enter the wholly agitated state of matrimony.

At first, of course, there is honeymoon, a bonding of cosmic proportions that bodes a life of productive, trusting bliss if not sex, with short breaks to work on his writing. His current Sidney Bard thriller “Perseid Meteor Thugs” is well under way. With his blessing, Zelda move into his house and starts her own novel. Their days are spent writing, loving, not in that order, and then eating hors d’oeuvres and having libations in the early evening the way we were meant to in the garden of Eden, here a small town in what we imagine might be New Mexico.

Then things begin to shift. She cleans his house. Big Al bites the dust. An irreverent photograph of his children comes down. Up goes her credo written on a napkin and framed: “I always win.” Roger has as his most salient characteristic, after his relish of all things sexual, an easy-going generosity. He doesn’t care about winning: He cares about keeping the peace and fostering the opportunity for sexual congress. He rolls with the punches. And a great deal of this novel chronicles her punches and his rolling.

Zelda notes, “I’m like Pancho Villa. . . . I’m fearless, I never learned how to retreat. I was born to attack.” The attacks concern: the mail, his former lovers, his ex-wife, nomenclature for sexual congress, the hypothetical if-I-die argument, a balloon ride, table manners and the children. Roger seems blindsided by each, dumbstruck, certainly struck, and he tries (oh how he tries) to accommodate his charming wife’s demands. The skirmishes escalate as does the wear and tear on Roger.

Some of these battles are broadly comic, some assume more heft. Roger’s former lover Gretel is dying of cancer, and Zelda’s jealously seems beyond understanding. Many moments test our patience with Roger and his great willingness to bend over backward when Zelda is clearly in the wrong. Roger drops his old friends, changes his customs and even denounces his own children to avoid her wrath. He falls impossibly behind on his book. There’s a funny argument when he offers Zelda the compliment of being his muse and she takes offense that she might have inspired the dreck he writes! The big tip off on Zelda for me came when she practiced mime in the garden, her face painted white with two big red dots on her cheeks. That’s over the top for anybody anywhere. . . .

The writing itself in this novel (which Nichols calls a “sleazy piece of fiction” in the dedication) most reminds us of Roger’s behavior: it feels profligate. Roger himself is “known in some circles as the Speedie Gonzales of sci-fi.” A few of his friends call it “the blam method of writing.” I’m not sure if Nichols used the blam method for “Conjugal Bliss,” but there are times when he seems to be writing with a grin, having more fun than we are. At other times, splashes of this book are reminiscent of the quirky juxtapositions of Richard Brautigan. Consider this coupling: “Then Zelda climbed all over me like Joe DiMaggio on his 56-game hitting streak, delightfully immortal and unstoppable.” And later these two one-line paragraphs: “I could kiss Zelda the way raindrops cling to a leaf” and “I could touch her intimate places like Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta.’ ” Four friends witness them fight “like monkeys watching the atomic bombing of their own private banana plantation.”

Nichols also gives us Zelda’s friend, the nutty Weezy Bednarik, who spies on Roger constantly but only communicates through a parrot hand puppet (which comes to a timely end) and Roger’s ungainly son Woody, a “dysfunctional Yeti” who resembles Sid Vicious playing “Quasimodo down on his luck.” Nichols also has a romp with the synopses of Zelda’s “novel” an outlandish tale of melodrama, sex, and mayhem, which Roger can’t resist peeking into.

“Conjugal Bliss” is a larger-than-life anti-romance, antic and full of low-jinx; imagine “Othello” by the writers of “I Love Lucy.” Even after Rogers comes to and realizes which way is up, (we hope) Nichols is not above pulling (or trying) a joke on the reader. John Nichols is to be celebrated as a grinning trickster with this wry roman a clef ??? a book rich in the humor and energy of caricature.