FICTION

INVOLVED by Walther Habers (Soho: $24; 308 pp.). Were the child at the center of this novel, Dick, to grow up and appear in another book, he just might look back and decide the best thing that ever happened to him was being run over by a car. His legs, as a result, were amputated below the knee--but the man who caused the accident, Bram Aardsen, is a successful Alfa Romeo dealer, and quite capable of helping Dick realize his dream of becoming a race-car driver. “Involved,” from this description, may sound like a feel-good Hollywood screenplay, but it’s more a portrait of a marriage than a triumph-over-adversity story. Bram isn’t exactly happily married to Francien, a housewife with time on her hands due to the couple’s infertility, but the two have a steady partnership--until Bram falls in love with Dick’s mother, the beautiful model Pauline. Most of the characters in Walther Habers’ novel, his first, are appealing and intelligent, so the central riddle of “Involved” is how they will cope with incompatible desires. The solution is happy and fairly predictable, but Habers’ almost clinical writing--you could almost guess he’s a former policeman--keeps the story moving along solidly, if not inventively. One of the best things about “Involved” is the title, for it keeps to the forefront the issue that each of Habers’ characters must face at some point; whether to participate in other’s lives, by choice or by obligation, and to what degree.