BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Haunted by Twin Crises of Love and Faith : MESHUGAH <i> by Isaac Bashevis Singer</i> translated by the author and Nili Wachtel; Farrar Straus Giroux $22, 240 pages

“I believed that God is a novelist who writes about what He pleases,” muses Isaac Bashevis Singer in “Meshugah,” “and the whole world has to read Him, trying to find out what He means.”

“Meshugah” is the third of Singer’s novels to be published since his death in 1991, but the fact that the author is dead is somehow fitting.

The characters in Singer’s books and stories are forever happening upon men and women who appear to return from the grave, and the beloved Singer can do no less.

“Has anyone ever written a novel about a person like me,” writes Singer in “Meshugah,” as if letting us in on a joke, “about loves and entanglements like mine?”

Set in New York, Paris and Tel Aviv in the early ‘50s, “Meshugah” focuses on the adventures of a Yiddish writer called Aaron Greidinger, a literary alter ego who is made to stand in for Singer in acting out the crisis of love and faith that sends him into the arms of various worshipful but damaged women.

“I had lived through two world wars, my entire family had perished, women with whom I had been close had been reduced to clumps of ashes,” Aaron says. “The people I wrote about were all dead. I had become a fossil of a long-extinct epoch. When my publisher introduced me at a literary party, the younger guests asked, ‘You are still alive?’ ”

Still, Aaron Greidinger discovers that a certain dark passion burns hot in the hearts and souls of the Holocaust survivors with which he finds himself, a circle of intimacy and betrayal that includes his admiring readers, his ardent lovers, his benefactors.

They are the tortured who remain tortured, but they still seek redemption in each other’s arms.

The apparent theme of “Meshugah”--the title is the Yiddish word for crazy --is a love triangle, but new and surprising angles come into view on every page, and every lover’s embrace is literally haunted by history.

Aaron is drawn to Miriam Zalkind, a beautiful young woman who managed to survive the very worst excesses of the Holocaust by the most dubious possible means. But Miriam also serves as a surrogate wife, daughter and lover to Max Aberdam, a charming old swindler who suckers orphans and widows into entrusting him with their reparation money.

“I live on pills and faith,” declares Max, “not in God but in my own crazy luck.”

Miriam is not the only woman who beckons Aaron Greidinger, and as he careens from bed to bed, he learns ever more horrifying details about Miriam’s wartime experiences. But he cannot bring himself to renounce her love even as he is physically sickened by what he discovers.

Not until the very last pages of “Meshugah” do we finally find out how Aaron responds to Miriam’s desperate overtures to marry her and give her a child.

“All that remained for us to do was to snatch a few moments of pleasure before we collided one with the other and, like the bubbles we were, burst,” Aaron remarks of Miriam and himself. “Both Miriam and I could neither be together nor stay apart. We did not deny God nor could we serve Him.”

At moments, “Meshugah” is a work of philosophical speculation dressed up as bedroom farce and black comedy.

It turns out that Miriam has a husband, too, and he shows up at an awkward moment with a gun in his hand. When Aaron seeks refuge in the bathroom of her apartment, his impulse is to search for a razor--and shave himself so he will look presentable to his would-be murderer.

And Aaron manages to engage the maniacal husband in theological discourse at the moment of greatest peril.

“God is evil?” Miriam’s husband demands of Aaron.

“At least to animals and men,” replies Aaron.

“How can you live with this sort of faith?”

“I can’t, really.”

“Meshugah,” like much of Singer’s work, was first published in serialized form in the Yiddish press, and the author worked with Nili Wachtel on the English translation in the early 1980s.

While “Meshugah” does not quite achieve the sublime heights of Singer’s greatest books--”The Slave,” for example, or “Satan in Goray”--it’s still vintage stuff, and somehow less stylized and more self-revelatory than much of Singer’s fiction. Even if the ultimate meaning of God’s novel is obscure, Singer is willing to make it clear what he means.

“Yes, where were the dead?” says Aaron Greidinger as he strolls through the empty streets of a Jewish neighborhood on the eve of the Jewish New Year.

“Where were their loves, their pains, their hopes, their illusions? Were they all gone forever? Or was there an archive somewhere in the universe where they were all recorded and remembered?”

Yes, indeed, there is such an archive, we realize as we read “Meshugah,” and it almost seems that Isaac Bashevis Singer is still at work there.

“Meshugah,” then, is one more addition to the archive, a worthy new chapter in the divine novel of which Singer continues to be the chief scrivener.