Passion Bubbles Over in a Rarefied World : BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : AS MAX SAW IT <i> by Louis Begley</i> Alfred A. Knopf: $21, 146 pages

Louis Begley writes with intimate knowledge about patrician America--Eastern Old Money, Auchincloss country--but with a good deal less politeness or the submerged emotions of his literary upper-crust counterparts. This was true in his second novel, “The Man Who Was Late,” as well as in his newest, “As Max Saw It.”

There are terrors lurking in the paradise he evokes: Auschwitz, with its legacy of death and tormented souls; sex as a battlefield and harbinger of disaster; aching loneliness, suicide and AIDS.

Begley first hands us a passport to the peaceable kingdom of Town & Country, where we find the not-so-beautiful but elegantly maintained women, with champagne-colored hair pulled back into short ponytails, and their consorts--the investment bankers, Wall Street lawyers, gray-haired handsome men timelessly fashionable in their cashmere and worn, white linen. The Town & Country features endlessly alternate between Deauville, Caribbean hideaways, the Hamptons and Italian villas.

The novel opens in that typical T&C; tone: “La Rumorosa, for that was the name of the . . . villa on the promontory just below Bellagio, where Lake Como divides to form a pair of clown’s pantaloons, blue and green, gold-speckled and shimmering, was one of those places where, sooner or later, everyone stayed.”

Even Max, our narrator, a Harvard law professor from solid, if not exactly moneyed, stock, admits he wouldn’t have been invited on his own into this rarefied world. He’s neither rich nor socially ambitious enough. He’s arrived at La Rumorosa on the coattails of an old college pal with connections.

Begley’s characters will soon find heartlessness, madness, cruelty and death ready to invade their privileged world. No barroom brawls here. People who know how to dress and use language well are less likely to resort to blows. But they are masters at destroying one another all the same.

Another guest at La Rumorosa is Charlie Swan, whom Max knew at college. Charlie, a world-famous architect, is a man of “extraordinary height and tightly curled hair very short, so that his head reminded one of a Roman bust.” Charlie proves quite the Roman.

He looks at human relationships in terms of pure politics--those who are loyal, those who betray. One night Charlie corners Max and verbally assaults him. Max “betrayed” him in the past when he “took so little time to know (him).” Charlie commands friendship as Caesar might have: “Henceforth, you are one of my intimates--they are very few! . . . Do not betray me again!”

Fate will have a way of forcing Max to take the trouble to know Charlie. He will also take the trouble to know a beautiful young man--”Eros himself”--called Toby, whom Max first spots by the pool at the villa. The young American, barely out of his teens, is Charlie’s lover, protege and ultimate source of destruction.

Max confesses that he is someone to whom “relationships don’t stick.” What he doesn’t recognize is that he hasn’t taken much trouble to know people in general. He has lived both financially and emotionally close to the bone, the nice, vague guy moving cautiously through life. He couldn’t be more different from arrogant, commanding, misogynistic Charlie--the man of grand passions, career, friendship, the seeker of love and pain.

Then mild Max inherits a fortune from a remote relative. The “right people” suddenly stick to him. He receives his very own invitation to La Rumorosa. “Vespasian was nuts to say that money has no smell,” Max observes, wryly. He sees through it all, but he’s never had such a good time either.

Over the next decade Max continues to observe the relationship with Charlie and Toby from an intimate point of view. Toby proves only adequate as an architectural protege. He doesn’t share Charlie’s friends or love of culture. He’s bisexual and promiscuous.

What exactly is between Charlie and Toby? It’s not always clear, but at one point Begley introduces a metaphor that, in a handful of words, sums it up. Describing the Saudi passion for birds of prey, Max says to Toby:

“ ‘Training hawks is a very cruel process. The eyelids of the young birds are stitched closed, to make them blind, and therefore dependent on their owner. Then when the bird’s dependency is judged sufficient, they cut the stitches and real instruction begins.’

“ ‘Stop,’ (Toby) said. ‘I don’t want to think of these things.’ ”

“As Max Saw It,” without ever mentioning the word, confronts AIDS and the bravery, sacrifice, commitment and horror it engenders. It’s the early ‘80s by the end of the story, and it is clear that something is seriously wrong with Toby.

Toby, intellectually and morally weak, fights dying. Charlie, ever the Roman, encourages him to embrace his mortality. His own willingness to do this brings the novel to a shocking close.

Begley is not the clearest of writers. There are confusing passages, characters who appear and disappear without much explanation, strangely clinical digressions. But he continues to face the unanswerable, fundamental issues in fiction that is elegantly wrought.

“You have heard the music of the spheres?” Charlie, a little drunk, asks Max. “It is the upgathered howl of pain, rising from every corner of the earth.”

Pain there may be, but such sublime writing as this can make us cry as well.