BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Eccentric Spin on Life’s Possibilities : WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA <i> by Scott Bradfield</i> , St. Martin’s, $18.95, 196 pages

It’s a daring title, all right, full of ego and smirk. Can one man tell us what’s wrong with this country in a mere 196 pages? Can one man know what’s wrong with America--and even if he does, isn’t the next step figuring out how to fix it?

But you can set the gargantuan queries aside. Bradfield is one of those writers who looks for cosmic answers in minuscule details; a practitioner of what I think of as lovable eccentric fiction. This is not a strident social treatise. It is, instead, the story (told mostly in journal entries) of irascible old Emma, who happened recently to blow a fatal hole in her impossible husband.

What did the poor guy do to deserve such a fate? Here’s where some of “what’s wrong with America” seeps into the tale. In no particular order: He complained daily about his home-cooked breakfast, turned the all-talk radio up too high, insisted on watching “Wheel of Fortune” every night even if it disrupted a home-cooked dinner (disrespect for culinary skills is a recurring theme here), dispatched birds with his shotgun, and spent inordinate sums on periodical subscriptions, while only grudgingly allowing Emma her monthly brandy allowance.

He was also a particular fan of Col. Robert Robertson’s Church of Immaculate Reason, a group run by an ex-CIA operative who liked to complain about Stalin, Mao, Castro and anyone else who seemed to be shackling free-thinkers.

Emma stood it as long as she could, some 40-odd years, and then one day she just cracked. She put Marvin in a hole in the yard, buried his savings so her two ungrateful offspring could someday claim the money, and set about trying to explain her life to her son and daughter, in a journal to be read after her death.

Nana might have sunk into brandy-soaked oblivion if it weren’t for the fact that her ne’er-do-well daughter (the sort who ran Astral Projection Seminars out of her apartment) has dispatched her teen-age son for an indefinite stay with the grandfolks.

So, impressionable Teddy becomes the one who figures out what’s really wrong with America (how bad are we, after all, at sorting through our psyches and leading any semblance of reasonable life). He embraces forgiveness. He gets it. And Bradfield exits the book having given even the most skeptical reader an oddball sense of possibility.

I can’t pretend to adore this novel, because I find that a little self-conscious wacko goes a long way. Here, everyone is an eccentric, or is perceived as one by Emma.

Before his demise, Marvin had actually written an essay on what’s wrong with America for his unpublished autobiography. What he comes up with is like a dentist’s probe in a wrecked filling: painfully wicked and all too real to ignore. I mean, we’re in a new era of electoral politics, treated daily to headlines about a very powerful man who may or may not have known that his chosen historian seems to believe in equal opportunity for Nazis and who presented a previous wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital suffering from cancer.

Maybe Bradfield is just the right kind of manic writer for the premillennial political circus. When you think about it, maybe his take on the world isn’t so eccentric after all. Nana Emma sounds pretty straightforward when you place her in the proper context. That could be part of what’s wrong with America: We’ve become so inured to bad behavior that nothing gets us very upset anymore.

Which makes Bradfield a delightfully subversive fellow. His heroine may start off seeming loopy, but what she did to Marvin turns out not to be the point. And besides: They seem to have more to say to each other once he’s dead than they ever did when he could change the channels himself.