Turns in the Road : INVOLVED, <i> By Walther Habers (Soho Press: $24; 320 pp.)</i>

The late and greatly missed Peter DeVries once noted, “Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.” That might be an ideal epigraph for this quirky, heartwarming first novel by Dutch writer Walther Habers.

Cruising along a Dutch country road in his Alfa Romeo as the novel opens, Bram Aardsen glances up only a moment to watch a Boeing 747 glide above him. But that moment is all it takes to miss seeing 12-year-old Dick Verwal on the road. By the time Bram hits his brakes, there’s little below Dick’s knees left to amputate.

Seldom since Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself changed into a giant insect has a tale opened with a more transformative climax. Out of this fated moment, Habers spins a cat’s cradle of relationships among Bram, Dick, Bram’s spirited wife Francien and Dick’s breathtaking mother Pauline that will change all four of their lives forever.

As Dick is rushed to the hospital, his mother lies in another hospital recuperating from a herniated disk and his father has expatriated himself to America. A guilty but reluctant Bram feels compelled to visit the boy, and these visits evolve quickly from duty to pleasure as Bram sees that Dick blames only his own carelessness for the accident and that Bram might be just the man to make Dick’s greatest dream come true. The boy wants passionately to become a race-car driver. As Holland’s leading Alfa Romeo import dealer, Bram has the technical savvy, the mechanics, the garage and the means to get Dick started.

Bram does not tell Francien about his afternoon visits to the hospital. He is developing paternal feelings for the boy, and this is a sore spot in their childless marriage. Francien has left a nursing career to be a housewife, but her lack of children makes her feel inadequate.

Before Bram begins constructing special racing equipment for Dick, he and Francien go on vacation to Italy where, outside of Milan, they are attacked by carjackers. Bram manages to blind one, and Francien hits another with a tire jack, killing him. But when an Italian television journalist asks to interview the spunky heroine only to humiliate her on the air and later sexually assault her, Francien’s rage and mistrust extend past the offender to men in general.

So Bram treads on dangerous ground when he begins visiting Dick’s home regularly and taking him for trial runs in a specially designed go-cart. Francien believes Bram’s real interest lies in the boy’s blue-eyed, black-haired mother, a high-fashion model. The same fiery spirit that clubbed a felon in Milan now lashes out at Bram in jealous rages barely this side of Medea’s: “You’re all the same. . . . Sneaking off to that call girl. . . . What must that boy think? First you make him an invalid and then you (fool) around with his mother.”

The louder Francien screams, the more she distances Bram, who eventually commits the infidelity Francien’s already convicted him of. Before long, Bram suspects he’s in love with Pauline. But Pauline is more devoted to modeling and to independence than to Bram, and the future of all four central characters will take several interesting twists before the novel’s unexpected resolution.

Habers, a former policeman and stockbroker, shows a masterful ability to work against the grain of reader expectations. Very little here turns out as we might expect. Bram’s careless driving accident brings him the child he’s wanted more than he realized. Bram often thinks with the wrong organ, Francien can be a jealous shrew and Pauline puts career before her child, yet each is so sympathetically rendered and sincerely motivated that it becomes impossible to judge them harshly. Bram is too nurturing and too appreciative of human accomplishment to dislike. Pauline’s selfishness has a selfless side. And Francien, counseled by her friend Marjet, who seems midway between Joyce Brothers and a Greek chorus, displays the novel’s greatest capacity for growth and heroism.

Oddly, set beside them, the angelic Dick, who never utters a bitter word about his fate, proves less absorbing, too idealized to be real. Thinking about the prosthetic feet that wait in his future, Dick says, “I’ll never have cold feet and no corns and nobody can step on my toes, and nobody will want to be in my shoes.” Not once is there a tear for the soccer games he won’t get to play.

But if there is something artificial in the boy’s purity, it nevertheless becomes the catalyst for bringing out the best in the three adults closest to him in this intelligent and sophisticated first novel.