WHAT MADE FREDERIC SEIZE THE RING?

Author: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, February 5, 1989
Page: 86
Section: BOOKS

So "A Theft" is notable not only for its who -- many would say Saul Bellow is America's greatest living author -- but also for its how. Paperback originals have been the exclusive domain of "category books" (romances, sci- fi, pulp novels, westerns); now they've added a new category, Nobel Prize winners.

It'd be nice to report that the what merits comparable attention. Instead, ''A Theft" is lesser, rather logy Bellow that falls between the cracks (there is something to be said for the wisdom of magazine editors): too thick for a good story, too thin for a good novel. Because it's Bellow, one reads it, and reads it gladly; but also because it's Bellow, one reads it with mounting disappointment.

Clara Velde, Bellow's heroine, has led a safely tumultuous life: two suicide attempts, four marriages, three daughters and a career that has brought her from Indiana to "a vast Park Avenue co-op apartment" and renown as "the czarina of fashion writing."

The great love of her life has been none of her husbands but a man named Ithiel Regler. Regler, a Washington insider-intellectual, is a sort of junior- grade Kissinger. "If he wanted, he could do with Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy . . . what Keynes had done with the Allies at Versailles. World figures had found Ithiel worth their while."

Certainly Clara found him worth her while -- continues to do so, in fact. Through all her marriages and nearly a quarter century they have maintained their relationship: now chaste, but one of deep devotion to one another. As an emblem of their love, Clara has the emerald Regler gave her as an engagement ring back when they lived together.

The latest of Clara's "dummy husbands, humanly unserious -- you could get no real masculine resonance out of any of them," is a feckless political consultant. With his career on the electoral road and hers on Seventh Avenue, they rely on a succession of au pairs to raise the girls. The incumbent is an Austrian named Gina Wegman. Clara depends on her, dotes on her and, despite herself, harbors doubts about her. She imagines Gina envisioning "America as the place you let yourself go."

Clara flies down to Washington to offer support when Regler's wife leaves him. In her absence, she allows Gina to throw a party. Returning, she receives unsettling reports about the festivities -- and especially about Gina's suspicious-looking boyfriend, a recent Haitian refugee named Frederic.

Here one notes the same ugly moral undercurrent that flared up in "Mr. Sammler's Planet" and "The Dean's December" -- impolite people might call it racism -- with its picture of the city as dark, threatening jungle. No one can dismiss such a view. But as Bellow presents it, with neither subtlety nor differentiation, it becomes at best a crotchet, and at worst a mania. It's a portrayal undemanding of his powers and unworthy of his intelligence.

Clara's misgivings prove warranted when she discovers her ring missing after another visit from Frederic. She confronts Gina and forces her to leave. The remaining third of the novella concerns Clara's efforts to recover the emerald and effect a reconciliation with Gina.

While "A Theft" hinges on just that, the crime is essentially incidental -- incidental to what is a real question, though. Bellow can't decide whether he wants his book to be a character study of this surprisingly inert woman acted upon by an all too ert world. Or a portrait of the relationship between Clara and Regler (in many ways, the most interesting thing in "A Theft").

Instead, it chugs along in ungainly fashion: as always with Bellow, never lacking in energy, but without any real destination. When Clara announces to a friend, "I have an anti-rest character. I think there's too much basic discord in me," she could be speaking for her creator, whose failure to harness his own discord makes "A Theft" that rarest of volumes in the Bellow canon: an unmemorable book.

MFEENE;01/27 LDRISC;02/06,14:49 BELLOW05