X20: A Novel of (Not) Smoking.<i> By Richard Beard</i> .<i> Arcade: 312 pp., $22.95</i>

What is your point? we ask the porcupine. I am not sure what Richard Beard’s point is, but I do know that he has his readers pierced and pinned from four or five different directions in mutual defiance of all logical geometry.

It is hard to improve on Beard’s subtitle for his literary joust between the dark and light angels of our killer vice and killer solace. “A Novel of (Not) Smoking” (“X20” refers to the number of cigarettes in a pack) continually switches the angels around. Vice is bad, and solace is good. So does vice condemn solace or does solace redeem vice? As for killer, it condemns both, yet since we all die--though not so soon or horribly--is there anything to say for solace?

There is, and Beard says it, but in a way that would make a tobacco manufacturer wish that the author’s pages had gone for cigarette paper, perhaps in the still untapped markets of China or Africa. (A former broker once recommended a cigarette stock; when I objected, he thought to reassure me that the company planned to concentrate its sales efforts upon the Third World.)

Beard has written a series of variations on smoking and not smoking, on starting up and giving up, on addiction and social reprobation, on the merciful pleasures and the merciless price. It is a play of wit and pain, a novel of ideas as a succession of comic and touching skits, a series of entrancing cape passes with the sword concealed and each character alternating as bullfighter and bull.

Nobody alternates more demonstratively than Gregory Simpson, the English narrator and protagonist. He is a human cuckoo clock, whose nonsmoker tick is followed by the smoker tock and vice versa. For his first 20 years or so he is a strict abstainer (tick), whose father (tock) owns a series of tobacco and news stores, and whose mother (tick) regularly writes him anti-smoking warnings laced with statistics and exclamation points. “She had discovered how to make her life tremendously exciting, not through alcohol or drugs but simply through punctuation.”

At college, Gregory falls passionately in love with Lucy, whose life principle depends on the cigarette (tock). Her mother was a beauty grown grossly fat; Lucy smokes to defend her slenderness and very identity against the maternal puddings. She tries to convert Gregory by taking him to movies of the 1930s and ‘40s. These confirmed beyond a doubt “that in times of stress like love and European war the only fully human action was always a smoke . . . as decent a response to hysteria as it was to boredom. Most comforting of all, it was absolutely safe. I saw nobody die of lung cancer, not on screen.”

He wavers to the point of getting Lucy to yield to him on his beanbag chair by promising to smoke a postcoital cigarette afterward. He can’t do it; she leaves him, and he flees to Paris. There he meets Ginny, an aspiring singer who avoids smoking (tick) to save her voice. They fall in love, but when he kisses her, he yearns for Lucy’s cigarette breath (tick into tock). Through Lucy, in other words, he has picked up nicotine addiction without even smoking, whereas kissing Ginny is going cold-turkey, and just as appealing.

Back in England, Gregory goes to work as a human guinea pig for a giant cigarette manufacturer: his job, to smoke 20 cigarettes a day (tock) to “prove,” in company-conducted tests, their harmlessness. Beard’s complex notions about smoking become straight condemnation in the case of the cigarette makers.

Julian, the college friend who got him the job, is an amoral company stooge. The company is indifferent to the efforts of Theo, a staff scientist, to develop a safe cigarette, but when he develops a strain resistant to the tobacco mosaic virus, he is fired and his home laboratory burned down. Anyone could grow the new strain, and the company’s high-capital advantage would shrink.

All these things are recalled in the present. They are told in 20 daily entries in a journal that Gregory has begun to keep. He has quit his job and given up smoking (tick, once more). He has begun to write, he tells us, because he needs something to do with hands accustomed to reaching for a cigarette.

The first entries are disjointed sentences alluding gnomically to the memoir he will relate; others are plain teeth-gritting: “Distract your mind. Take up a new hobby. Occupy your hands.” And, “Breathe deeply. Indulge yourself in every other way.” Later the entries smooth out.

Gregory emerges as a man of passive wavering and incompetent regrets, particularly in his treatment of Lucy and Ginny. Beard writes the first affair as comic satire; the second, even wittier, is tinged with a moving tenderness.

It is only in his decision to quit smoking that Gregory finally takes a stand, though too late. It is a stand not against smoking as such, but against the tobacco company and its treatment of Theo. Gregory’s closest friend and a militant smoker, he had just died of lung cancer.

Theo is the book’s hero; the humane paradox around which the author entangles his theme. Brilliant, expansive, eccentric, he took up smoking not as a habit but as a defiance. His mother, a drinker and smoker, was killed when a truck struck the rear of a bus she was riding. So smoking kills? Theo demands. So does anti-smoking: bus rules made his cigarette-puffing mother sit in the back.

Beard is not concerned with logic, and certainly Theo’s logic is terrifying. Once a week he goes out to The Estates, a housing project, and distributes cartons of cigarettes to its impoverished residents who tell him of the tiny comfort they give to a hopeless life. Emma, a local environmental activist, accuses him of working to murder her father, Walter, who lives in The Estates.

Walter is a vigorous 104, however, a flamboyant living record of the place that smoking has held through centuries of civilization. He is full of extravagant smoking-can-be-essential-to-your-health stories. A soldier in World War I, about to be shot as a deserter, demands his final cigarette. Striking a match to light it, the officer in charge is killed by a sniper, and the soldier goes free. In a different, wilder version, the soldier is saved when the officer collapses from passive smoking, victim of the lit cigarette.

Walter is a zany embroidery running through Gregory’s story and the contradictions that the author draws from it. Less playfully, Beard draws them from the love affair that blossoms between Emma and Theo, the object of her protest. After Theo’s death, she and Gregory recall how the lovers moved toward each other:

Emma: “I was prepared to tell him I might have been wrong, even though I knew I wasn’t wrong.”

Gregory: “He said you were probably right, and smoking could be a terrible thing. But he didn’t believe it. Is that what love is?”

Ostensibly, Beard’s blithely tick-tock extremities simply dramatize the need for the smoking battle to be waged, not from dug-in enemy camps but from a pliant common humanity. Yet his novel’s subtle texture seems to contemplate a less restricted theme: the nature of human frontiers, the boundaries between ego and intimacy and whether it is really necessary to arm them.