LET SOME WRITERS STICK TO THEIR GENRES, AND OTHERS STEER CLEAR

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, March 1, 1998

Page: F2

Section: Books

The popular literary genres of science fiction, animal adventure, mystery and its subspecies, are, like all vital things, prey to parasites. Science fiction is especially vulnerable to gimcrack philosophy, animal tales to parable, and mysteries, the most preyed-upon of all, to intellectualism in all its drab hues. Why should this be?

First, let us consider the honest practitioners. Certain writers work in a genre because that's where their talents lie. Of these, some are (at best) simply entertaining, but a few are writers of the first rank. Among the latter are Philip K. Dick in science fiction, Kenneth Grahame in animal adventure, and Raymond Chandler in mysteries. Despite the presence of real artists at work in these categories, a lot of people, readers and writers alike -- let's call them prigs -- look down on genre fiction because they disapprove of reading for fun. Worse than such bluenoses, however, are the vile condescenders -- let's call them smarty pants -- who feel themselves above writing genre but fancy the idea of slumming and, indeed, wouldn't mind cashing in (with tongue in superior cheek, of course). The product of such pens is as unwholesome as that of the adolescent black fly.

I may as well confess that it was with such thoughts as these that I took up Martin Amis's ``Night Train'' (Harmony, $20), and I was not, as it were, disappointed. Here Amis adapts hard-boiled cop fiction to his own purposes. He has retained that genre's air of hard-bitten world-weariness, but eliminated the standard (one might even say necessary) ingredients of suspense and action. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a suicide that doesn't make sense because the dead woman is beautiful and seemingly fulfilled. A message pulses intermittently through the narrative's loose weave, signaling something profound -- and if not that, certainly portentous -- about the evolution of human consciousness as it applies to homicide and suicide. The pressure of meaningfulness is huge, and one can almost hear the creak of the author's brainpan as it delivers itself of such cosmological twaddle as ``Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.''

This may be the time, too, to confess my aversion to Martin Amis's novels in general. I find them smug, wordy, and busy with unrevelatory figures of speech. But the language in ``Night Train'' is even sloppier and more tone-deaf than usual. Amis gets American argot wrong again and again, chiefly in nuance and timing, but occasionally even in sense, as when ``beaners'' (if you will excuse the expression) become Italians. But most trying is the clangor of his off-kilter similes, so very far from le mot juste: ``There'd been rain and the house was on a slow drip.'' Yes?

``The Empire of the Ants'' by Bernard Werber (translated, from the French, by Margaret Rocques, Bantam Books, $23.95) is a very fine tale of animal adventure untainted by parable but with a minor element of science fiction. The latter, unfortunately, opens the door to some flaccid philosophizing -- which does not, on the other hand, become intrusive until well toward novel's end. It is certainly worth putting up with in order to enter the wonderfully imagined world of the ant that Werber creates. His ants are both sympathetically anthropomorphic and joltingly alien. Their activities and beliefs, the scenes of their lives and deaths, the way of their world altogether, are rendered with enthralling verisimilitude. I am, in fact, quite haunted by certain episodes in this novel and feel I know its hero, the unfortunate 375th male, and its heroines, the ambitious 56th female, the courageous 103,683d soldier, and the doughty 4,000th warrior. As for the villainous dwarf ants: I shudder at the memory of their silhouettes forming ``a black frieze thirsty for revenge.'' Oh, that I could divert them by tossing a few dozen black-fly grubs into their ranks.

Let me finish off these observations on genre novels by saying that I hate to see a writer who is a master of a genre departing from it in search of greater seriousness and, I presume, greater respectability. This, I fear, is what Elmore Leonard's ``Cuba Libre'' (Delacorte, $23.95) represents. Leonard pretty much owns the territory of the low-wattage petty criminal, the ex-con, the guy for whom nothing seems too good to be true. He is clearly delighted by the human propensities for self-delusion and for acting on self-interest improperly understood; and he is a master at rendering this state of affairs with bemusement and humor. But there's very little of that sensibility in ``Cuba Libre,'' over whose pages history casts a sobering shadow.

Set in Cuba, the novel begins three days after the sinking of the US battleship Maine in Havana Harbor, the event that 100 years ago precipitated the Spanish-American War and launched United States imperialism. The book, in other words, is a timely one -- but it's also about as evocative of the past as a school play, and as entertaining. Not only has Leonard abandoned his urban dullards; the present characters keep having conversations that sound as if they were taken from educational films: `` `There's the sugarhouse,' Amanda said, `full of machinery they shove the cane into to make sugar . . .' She paused. `If the mill doesn't have a centrifuge it can only make brown sugar. Did you know that?' '' I do now.

To be sure, there is one genuinely amusing scene involving a sartorially obsessed official, and some exciting adventure. Thanks to the latter, I read ``Cuba Libre'' at a good clip. But I sincerely hope it does not signal a change in species for Leonard's novels. He is both a master of genre and the possessor of a unique sensibility, and as such represents the best of popular fiction. The hedonistic readers among us would hate to see that felicity lost.