Call Him Whatever You’d Like : A novel in which the narrator’s organizing obsession is java-phobia : MEMOIR FROM ANTPROOF CASE, <i> By Mark Helprin (Harcourt Brace: $24; 514 pp.)</i>

The title of Mark Helprin’s new novel, “Memoir from Antproof Case,” is a baffling semantic unit. There’s no way of telling before you crack the covers what those four words might mean. To the bookstore customer they announce impending weirdness, which is part of what the customer who buys the book gets. The title-page mini-mystery is cleared up by the end of the first chapter: The novel, we learn, is the memoir of a very peculiar 80-year-old man who keeps the pages of the document in “a totally antproof case” for posterity’s sake. Just one copy exists--because the copying machine in the local “reproduction store” is next to a coffee urn, and the salient peculiarity of this odd octogenarian memoirist is his manic aversion to coffee.

He introduces himself with two sentences that make him sound like a stand-up comic with a weakness for literary allusion: “Call me Oscar Progresso. Or, for that matter, call me anything you want, as Oscar Progresso is not my name. . . . No one knows my real name anymore.” Echoing Melville’s famous opener makes sense in so far as “Memoir From Antproof Case,” like “Moby Dick,” is an action-packed story of obsession and revenge, though Ahab’s white whale fetish is considerably more compelling than the java-phobia of this old man whose name is not Oscar Progresso.

By the time I got to the fifth chapter, in which Old No-Name relives his glory days as a World War II fighter pilot, it occurred to me that since Helprin was in an allusive mood he might well have called his novel “The Rime of the Ancient Aviator” in honor of Coleridge’s gray-beard loon, the ancient mariner cursed with the compulsion to tell his ghastly tale.

Helprin’s title and the first lines are worth pondering if only because there are more than 500 pages left to turn, and the tone he opens with persists. More odd mysteries than the anti-coffee mania await unraveling; lyrical passages brim with high-tone literary prose; broad comic riffs announce themselves with take-my-wife subtlety; and tall tales sprout magically at every turn, fed by a steady stream of flamboyant exaggeration: “I can’t wear shoes. My feet are highly unstable on account of the huge curvature of my legs. . . . My leg bows give me almost supernatural strength--the Roman arch--but I need very stable shoes, so I wear only climbing boots. At formal functions, they tend to stand out.”

Armed with a Walther P-88 as protection against paid assassins, the anonymous old aviator sits and writes in a hilltop garden in Niteroi, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro. He was born in 1904 on the banks of the Hudson, a short train-ride north of New York City. His path from one hemisphere to the other leads through murder, a Swiss lunatic asylum, Harvard University, Oxford University, a World War, partnership in a sinisterly powerful investment bank, marriage to a vastly rich heiress, theft on a monumental scale, more murder and perilous, Indiana Jones-style escape.

If this diet sounds too rich, like chocolate fudge topped with chocolate sauce, consider also that Helprin, author of “Winter’s Tale” and “A Soldier of the Great War,” generates a fabulous outpouring of language, dazzlingly various and at times shockingly original. In the space of 10 pages he can describe a thrilling victory in aerial combat (the adrenaline rush of a dogfight, two ME-109s vanquished by our hero’s P-51); the slack delirium of an erotic daydream (our hero blissfully inattentive to the approaching enemy); the fiery ditching of a fighter riddled with cannon fire (our hero spitting blood as he goes down); many miles of swimming, wounded, in the Mediterranean (“an old and gentle sea, shallow and warm, blue and green--the color of sapphires and sea turtles”); many miles of walking, wounded, through the Lybian desert (“the sun came up, the orange clock of Africa”); and the inevitable rescue (“The horizon at dawn jumped from an inexplicable union of black and gray inks to a sharply penned line, and as if to echo this newfound resolution, the road suddenly appeared before me”). The action is utterly improbable, the writing utterly convincing.

When our hero turns outlaw with a plan for filching 2,222 gold bars worth about $650,000 from the investment bank where he once worked, the details are so engrossing that you’re ready to forget his cockeyed motive, which, as he puts it, is to “bankrupt those arrogant coffee-drinking bastards.” There it is: obsession and revenge.

Suspense alternates with silliness; even a late revelation that makes some sense out of the old man’s lifelong oddity can’t rescue the novel from this lurching Ping- Pong pattern. Half of the time Helprin dedicates his virtuoso talent to pompous melodrama and vulgar clowning. You could justify this on thematic grounds by claiming that Helprin is out to celebrate eccentricity and the life-giving force of unrestrained imagination. To bolster the argument you could quote the ancient aviator’s closing advice: “You must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith.” But a theme, no matter how bold and romantic, can’t steer a novel that careens through the century like a runaway roller-coaster.

In his last rant against “the Devil’s nectar” the old man declares: “We are all perfect clocks that the Divinity has set to ticking.” He explains that caffeine disturbs “the metronome that rests within the heart.” This is heavy-handed irony. The crowded life recorded in “Memoir From Antproof Case” jolts along to a ragged rhythm--the heart of the novel could hardly beat more wildly. In fact, it’s exhausting. It makes you want to settle down in front of a steaming cup of coffee.