BOOK REVIEW: NOVEL : Hunting for Order in a Disorderly World : HUNTERS AND GATHERERS <i> by Geoff Nicholson</i> ; The Overlook Press; $21.95, 215 pages

Most serious novels, at some level, are about the act of writing itself. How could it be otherwise? Credible characters take on lives of their own, to the point of shaping a book’s tone and direction; the author is forced to engage, not unlike Dr. Frankenstein, with entities of her own creation--and thus is haunted, inexorably, by the process that spawned them.

Good novels exist, of course, that have nothing to do with writing; but the best novels deal with the author’s place in the world as well as those of his characters, and thus provide the double lenses essential to three-dimensional, stereoscopic perception.

Geoff Nicholson may have entertained such thoughts upon commencing “Hunters and Gatherers,” his arresting, winning sixth novel, but I doubt it--self-consciousness usually does a writer more harm than good.

You can’t hear the novel’s main story line--a man’s attempt to write a book about collectors and collecting--without realizing that Nicholson will eventually have to address the subject of writing.

Novelists, after all, constantly face the collector’s threshold choices, though with regard to literary rather than physical material: which particulars to include or exclude, when to reign in their intuitions or let them loose.

Steve Geddes, who intermittently narrates “Hunters and Gatherers,” is a down-and-out former bartender recently separated from his advertising-executive wife. Geddes has long perceived himself as a writer, but hasn’t actually bothered to write until he finds himself possessing, subsequent to a drunken spree with a friend in publishing, a substantial advance for a proposed book of nonfiction called “The Collectors.”

He quickly finds a few endearing eccentrics worthy of “The Collectors”--the stand-up comedian with a roomful of index-carded jokes, the teetotaler boasting shelf upon shelf of empty beer cans, the woman with miles of surreptitiously recorded audio tape, the professional car-washer memorizing a new encyclopedia, the bookie with a warehouse of classic cars.

At first Geddes is happy to be a working writer, but soon finds he can’t put ideas to paper, unable to assume the collecting frame of mind that would allow him to organize his research.

The most important collector in the book turns out to be someone Geddes doesn’t initially perceive as a collector--Thornton McCain, a forgotten, William Burroughs-like novelist somehow involved in most of the other collections.

Geddes reads an article calling McCain’s work “beachcombing, picking up all manner of literary and verbal flotsam.” He hears from McCain in person that “the writer’s job is one of pattern-making, putting things together.”

What Geddes learns above all from McCain is that such pattern-making (read, “collecting”) is an artificial attempt to control one’s environment, one’s destiny--that collecting is “an act of appropriation. . . . You decide what matters and what’s valuable. You make a neat world. You make a collection in your image.”

It should be clear by now that this novel rests on a contradiction--the need to order the world while accepting, simultaneously, the misleading nature of order. “Hunters and Gatherers” embodies this contradiction quite brilliantly, for although it often threatens, through apparently disconnected vignettes, to go off the deep end, Nicholson eventually links them together--philosophically, if not literally--through McCain.

Geddes, of course, never finishes “The Collectors,” but he does become an recognized authority on literary “junk collector” Thornton McCain.

So who is the novel’s hero? Geddes? McCain?

No. That distinction belongs to Mike--a used-car dealer, no less, and also, it turns out, a one-time fan of McCain. Mike is the only character actively to renounce his instincts for collection, despite the fact that he has collected most of those things supposedly indicative of “the good life”--a nice apartment and flashy clothes, good booze and better parties, fast cars and faster women.

Mike decides, as a result of his encounters with Geddes and McCain, to change his life, saying, “A lot of people like to measure a man by what he’s got. I’ve decided to measure myself by what I can give up.”

Mike becomes, in essence, an anti-collector and disappears from the book, thus allowing Nicholson to have his cake and eat it, too--to incorporate disorder within order. It’s a shrewd bit of legerdemain, and indicative of the bright, penetrating intelligence lying behind this novel.