BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Tales of Loneliness, Bygone Eras and Love : THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE WRITER, by Wright Morris; Black Sparrow Press $30, 589 pages

What makes one work of literature “dated” and another stay as fresh as when it was written? Case in point: these two reissued novels by Wright Morris--one, “The Works of Love” (1951), a classic of its kind; the other, “The Huge Season” (1954), no longer much more than a curiosity.

Neither novel is “original” in the sense of being free of the influence of other writers. The difference seems to be that Morris, who won the National Book Award for “The Field of Vision” in 1956 and an American Book Award for “Plains Song” in 1981, could make some influences part of his own sensibility, while others remained undigested lumps.

Morris dedicates “The Works of Love” to “the memory of Sherwood Anderson,” and he might have mentioned Willa Cather, too. It’s a deceptively simple tale about an unremarkable man, Will Jennings Brady, born in a sod house in frontier Nebraska, who makes a modest pile as an egg wholesaler in Omaha, has two unhappy marriages, raises a son not his own, fails utterly to fathom the mystery of life but does sense that it is a mystery.

“A man who headed no cause, fought in no wars, and passed his life unaware of the great public issues--it might be asked: Why trouble with such a man at all?” Morris asks us. “Well, there are women, for one thing--men of such caliber leave a lot up to the women--but in the long run . . . Brady is there by himself. That might be his story.”

Brady’s loneliness, his inability to connect with others, has personal origins--he is an orphan, brought up in a near-wilderness--but it’s also the universal American loneliness, which the beautifully rendered period detail of Morris’ story makes not a bit less timeless.

In the world’s eyes, even in his own, Brady is a self-made man. Morris shows how, fragile and hollow as a balloon, he is actually moved by the slightest breezes--a glimpse through a train window of prostitutes sunning themselves, an older businessman’s flattery, a well-to-do widow’s glance at her husband’s funeral.

“The Works of Love” flows chronologically, relying on suspense of the most basic kind: What will happen next to this prosperous, doomed, culpable yet radically innocent soul? “The Huge Season,” in contrast, gets its suspense from artificial stimuli--foreshadowing, flashbacks--as if Morris sensed that it needed them to succeed at all.

In 1952, an ex-Communist, J. Lasky Proctor, testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee. For Peter Foley, a classics professor who roomed with Proctor in college at Colton, Calif. (read Claremont), this triggers memories of a golden age they shared with a heroic, self-destructive tennis star, Charles Lawrence, and a femme fatale, Montana Lou Baker, they met in Paris--an age that ended abruptly in 1929 when Lawrence, humiliated by a prank, killed himself.

Chapters of Foley’s memoir of the group alternate with episodes of the day after Proctor’s testimony, when Foley travels to New York, visits his surviving friends, finds them much diminished and is freed from his “captivity” to the past.

The writing here is often just as vivid, but the emotional current that runs so effortlessly in “The Works of Love” is blocked time and again--by a lump of Hemingway, a lump of Fitzgerald, a little stream-of-consciousness from Joyce, a lot of slang that shows its age. We don’t feel, as Morris’ 1950s readers perhaps were able to, why Lawrence was so fascinating, exactly what Proctor’s testifying implies, why Foley is so caught up in others’ lives that he is “scarcely alive himself”--and without such key motivations, the story falls flat.