A voice from below that commands attention

“I want to save guys like me from becoming guys like me.” With this message, painfully wrought and apprehensively delivered, a young American Nazi gets in to see Meyer Maslow, Auschwitz survivor and founder of a plush organization that combats political repression and ethnic hatred worldwide.

“A Changed Man” is the title of Francine Prose’s novel of energetic exploration, cool irony and sheer -- I might almost say shameless -- suspense. It refers to Vincent Nolan, who seeks to work with Maslow’s World Brotherhood Watch to combat the Aryan supremacy group he’s just fled. A changed man, certainly, but in what way and for what reasons, and beyond that, what does change really mean?

Nolan is a blue-collar loser, unable to hold a job, thrown out by his girlfriend and finally taken in by his cousin, an angry activist in the supremacy movement. Sharing their anger at the government, he mutes his doubts about their racist rantings and generally conforms. Until, that is, he steals his cousin’s truck, stash of tranquilizers and $1,200 and comes to New York.

Nothing about Nolan is immediately clear. He is a roughneck with an intuitive interest in ideas, he reads Dostoevsky as well as Soldier of Fortune magazine, he is a mix of goodwill, flaring angers and cloudy purpose. He gives half a dozen different reasons for his conversion. He is the unstable oscillation, the Heisenbergian uncertainty principle (changing under scrutiny), between two solidly familiar fictional poles.

One of these is Maslow, the sleek, seemingly assured epitome of rewarded altruism. Unquestionably he is an idealist; he has labored tirelessly to do great good and, since such good depends on indulging the New York wealthy, he has done well by it. Prose takes no easy shots: Her Maslow is not really a cynic. He feels the amiable contamination of the company he keeps, but he depends on the power and ease it gives him. Touch pitch and it will defile; Maslow touches velvet and it caresses.

The other pole is Bonnie Kalen, Maslow’s faithful deputy, a worn handbook of liberal scruples, a borborygmic caldron of intestinal self-guilt. Seemingly a beneficiary of the feminist wars, she finds herself as bound and knotted as ever, her subservience to a demanding surgeon husband (who’d left her for another woman) replaced by an ostensibly junior partnership in the work of the lofty Maslow. As with gas dynamics, where something lofts, something else has to sink.

Bonnie has exchanged a blatant helpmeet role for one more refined: relieving Maslow of chores so he can exercise sublimity. One chore -- after the two of them recognize the fundraising potential of displaying a repentant Nazi to the world -- is to shelter Nolan, who fears reprisals from his former comrades. She takes him into her suburban home, much to the angry fears of Danny, her 16-year-old son, and the puzzlement of son Max, 12.

Part of “A Changed Man” traces the chemical precipitate when this volatile element is plunged into a domestic brew whose civilized comity is precariously unstable following the marital desertion. Prose advances some shrewdly unexpected results. Nolan, the disquieting 30-year-old waif, turns out to be perceptive and protective; Danny’s lonely hostility melts before an understanding stranger. And beneath Bonnie’s perpetual jitters a different emotion -- still jittery of course -- begins to grow.

These are eddies, though significant ones, in the novel’s current. With narrative skill and growing suspense, Prose recounts the handling of Nolan as the foundation’s burgeoning asset. There is an exquisitely awkward practice dinner with a gathering of society patrons. There is his dramatic unveiling at a full-scale fundraiser. And when he triumphs -- owing to a stark, undisclosable irony -- the publicity machine revs up.

The climax is a nationwide television show conducted by a male version of Oprah Winfrey. Within this climax there is another one, far more tense. Nolan’s supremacist cousin, understandably enraged, confronts him before the cameras and violence follows, though not the lethal kind we may expect. (Prose disdains a cheap thrill; hers are fully funded.) Instead of disaster, it twists into paradoxical triumph.

The author is a master of detailed social satire. (Species: How We Live Now. Subspecies: Chattering Classes.) Her novel benefits lavishly from it, as it does from the revolver (Nolan) introduced at the start that hangs fire right through to the end.

As a character, Nolan remains something of a mystery, but a good one: a series of peaks showing through cloud cover, their foothill connection obscured. Maslow, on the other hand, is all too visibly determined by his role. Bonnie, an unending succession of telegraphed tremors and low-spirited moans, is marooned in hers.

Essentially, though, “A Changed Man” is a novel of ideas, and provocative ones. Class -- the dirty American secret -- is no secret to Prose.

Her right-wing fanatics may be trailer-park trash, but, she implies, what part of our privilege puts the trash out? Nolan’s pillaged and aggrieved Nazi cousin gets his full say; few besides George Bernard Shaw, with his undeserving poor, have managed such a stinging voice from below. *