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A Changed Man

By Francine Prose

HarperCollins, 421 pp., $24.95

The novelist John Gardner used to say that there are only two stories worth telling: Someone goes on a journey. Or a stranger comes to town. Francine Prose's wonderful, dark, and hilarious new novel, ''A Changed Man," develops both time-honored themes.

Some stranger. Some journey. Vincent Nolan, 32, white supremacist, SS bolts tattooed on one bicep, a death's head on the other, has an epiphany. In the middle of a rave and fueled by ecstasy, Vincent senses a light haloing the disc jockeys. All at once he bursts with love for the kind of citizen any good skinhead would scorn: ''black . . . Jewish . . . Communist, freaks, retarded, mutant, whatever." It's a sign to change his life around. He steals a truck, money, and drugs from his cousin Raymond, on whose Aryan Resistance Movement couch he has been bunking. He takes off only to show up in the office of World Brotherhood Watch headed by Meyer Maslow, Holocaust survivor. Face to face with the great man, ''the old Nolan sees a fat-cat Jew with a million-dollar corner office. The new one sees a hero who survived Hitler to fight for justice and tolerance." Astonished, Meyer stares at him. ''I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me," Vincent announces.

With the drop of this bombshell, Vincent begins his transformation. First, he must hide from Raymond. Defectors from ARM are at risk of -- if not death -- then losing body parts. Most important, however, he wants to prove that anybody, even a rotten sociopath, can change. He hopes to understand the difference between his SS tattoos and the Auschwitz numbers etched on Meyer's arm. He needs to atone for his previous life.

In the process, his internal journey generates an external influence on the do-gooders surrounding him. Settling right in, he's given a desk at the offices of Brotherhood Watch, and a bed in the suburban home of Bonnie Kalen, the foundation's fund-raiser, a divorced single mother of two sons. ''Taking a skinhead stranger home to spend the night alone with you and your children," Bonnie realizes, could mean she'd lost her mind if she didn't have such faith in the greatness of Brotherhood Watch. Instead, following Meyer's advice, she tries to think of Vincent as a person ''newly escaped from a cult."

As temporary guest quarters become more permanent, the Nazi -- or former Nazi -- in their midst shakes things up for the Kalen family. Loath to yell at her children with a stranger in the house -- ''how depressing that the presence of a neo-Nazi could make a person behave more like a civilized adult" -- Bonnie finds herself attracted to this stranger, a reader of Dostoevsky no less. Vincent makes a different impression on her 12- and 16-year-old boys, who harbor heartbreaking anxieties.

Meyer, too, has worries of his own. Is he using the Holocaust as a trump card to get sympathy even though he realizes there will soon be ''no one left alive with the indisputable right to play it"? Is he ''practicing telescopic philanthropy, mistreating those closest to him in his efforts to save people on the other side of the planet"? For Meyer, Vincent has become a godsend, someone useful to go on talk shows, sit next to socialites in Park Avenue dining rooms, to give interviews. And, even better, a potential media star who will reflect well on Meyer's projects, bring new attention and more money to Brotherhood Watch. Soon enough, Vincent's living the good life, the ''paid consultant to an international foundation, earning room and board and two hundred dollars a week for riding to work with Bonnie and telling her his life story and writing down everything he saw and heard while he was in ARM."

But Vincent's presence is a double-edged sword. After all, what happens when the man you're using to promote your cause steals all the limelight from you? Prose is a master at exposing the private pettiness of a public big heart. ''Does Irene think that Nelson Mandela does bookstore readings and tours?" asks Meyer when his wife tut-tuts his latest book's downward-spiraling sales. Major donors should ''fund more food drops and phone calls to Iran, and buy less Calvin Klein," Bonnie suggests. Prose's sly, wicked wit skewers philanthropists, fund-raisers, benefits, foreign adoption, class, TV talk shows, marriage, and all forms of political correctness. Her tour de force is a tour de farce. Like Mel Brooks, she makes fun of what social strictures forbid us to laugh about. The novel is packed with rib-clutching scenes. When, just before an important speech at a huge fund-raising event, Vincent starts to go into anaphylactic shock, he figures ''if he's going to get sick, he might as well do it in front of the maximum number of Jewish doctors." As proof of nurture over nature, Vincent's transplantation into enriched do-good soil converts him from Nazi to mensch. He passes up an opportunity for sex with Bonnie because he really cares for her. ''He's become the kind of jerk who would work for Brotherhood Watch, some worried, cautious loser, concerned about consequences. He's become the male Bonnie."

Prose glides back and forth from each character's point of view without a misstep or false note. Can a person change? she asks, then threads subtle answers into the crackling social commentary. By the end of this fabulous novel, Prose's fierce intelligence, brilliant storytelling, and sharp characterization will not only provoke her readers into the oohs and aahs of recognition but will also offer them something profound.

Mameve Medwed's fourth novel, ''How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life," will be published next year.