The Word Made Flesh : ATHENA, <i> By John Banville (Knopf: $22; 240 pp.)</i>

In his 10th novel, John Banville returns to the protagonist of his eighth (“The Book of Evidence”), a sad, homicidal monologuist who tells and tells and tells us his troubles. Banville is an elegant, witty writer whose prose is intelligent, deft, often gripping. Freddy Montgomery, the first and, really, only person in “Athena,” is endowed, for all his bumbling, fumbling ineptitude, with his author’s great gifts. While Montgomery is apparently bent on constructing an apostrophe--a long song of love to a nameless, seductive female presence whom he loved and who left him--he is really on his master’s errand: to hymn the her who is a muse and make gestures toward saying something about the nature of art.

John Fowles did it in 1982 in “Mantissa”; his muse was cheeky and smart and she proved herself an essay in disguise. William Gass did it, with gorgeous language that felt made of flesh, in his 1968 story, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” John Hawkes worked that line of country in “The Blood Oranges” in 1974 and of course behind them all is “Lolita,” in which Nabokov writes a great love story that is also the story “of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” as Nabokov’s homicidal lover says in his apostrophe to his vanished mistress.

Writers seem to need to address their field of endeavor. They seem to need to express their disgust with or fear of their language. They try to make their words into flesh; they need to see the word as their beloved, and they need us to see it, as Nabokov’s Humbert said, with “bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies.”

Banville, in this tradition, writes of his killer in lovely prose, setting the novel in a kind of dream world in which Montgomery is lured into a moldering great house and set to work evaluating paintings (probably stolen) that are part of a lucrative plot. Montogomery is soon seduced by the woman he calls A. It is a paranoiac world, this novel, and nothing--neither the paintings, their possible owner (or thief), and A.--is what it, he or she seems. The lover of course disappears--as the muse so criminally, and as love so lamentably, does--and Montgomery is left to write the lament we now read.

The prose is clever--”Before such little doors of doubt can open more than a crack my mind jumps up in panic and slams them shut” --and it reminds us that Banville’s writing is almost always distinguished: “one of those slightly hallucinatory, dreamy afternoons of early autumn, all sky and polished-cooper clouds and thin, petrol-blue air.”

But A. is mostly talked about; she rarely speaks; so she is always a second-hand character, a report, even at her most fleshly: “I turn from the window and you are lying on your front amid the tangled sheets, wearing only a short, satin vest . . . and smoking a cigarette. . . . You feel my eyes on you . . . and smile the smile of a debauched child. . . .” The result is a sense of distance--A. is a rumor of love, an idea about art, not someone about whom the reader can be convinced to care. When the lover says that he will call her A., and tells us to “Think of all the ways it can be uttered, from an exclamation of surprise to a moan of pleasure or pure pain . . . A. My alpha; my omega,” we are reminded that lovers are never aware how tedious they can be--we want to hear about our own love, or nightmares, or needs, not theirs--and we are reminded of the start of “Lolita”: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

And if this mistress-muse is a literary confection, so are the other characters: the wise, leering detective, who (like the other characters) uses Montgomery; Morden, the owner or thief of the paintings who looms in his house like a shabby god; and Francie, “the fixer,” Morden’s strong-arm lad “with scant reddish hair under a flat cap, face like a chisel, and a fag-end with a drooping inch of ash attached to a bloodless, hardly existent thin long line of lower lip.” Francie “seemed to be always about . . . he had an unnerving way of materializing silently out of doorways. . . . He had a little mocking salute that he would give me.” He is of course out of “Brighton Rock” and Graham Greene’s lesser entertainments and noir films of the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Periodically, we are told how to think about the alleged conjunction here of art and love: “You were the pictures and they were you and I never noticed. All this I understand now--but then; ah, my dear, then!” Montgomery tells her (and us) “I was content . . . until you became animate suddenly and stepped out of your frame.”

A. seduces Montgomery further, into beating her, wounding her, and he both sullies himself by enjoying her perversions, then cleanses himself by confessing them. They do not make A. more actual to us, however, because she is so clearly a function of a large idea, but not of any feeling. When the narrator says, “She talked endlessly when I was there,” we can only laugh, since we do not know her voice; we know that hers is his, and his is Banville’s. When he tells us of smells, which he often does, we know soon enough that they will be reported in a series that will link the banal to the unusual--”He smelled of shaving balm and the beginnings of gum disease”; “She smelled of brine and bread and something excitingly musty and mushroomy;” “her smell, a powerful brew of cheap scent, mothballs and a dusty reek . . . reminiscent of the smell of cretonne curtains.” We have to acknowledge Banville’s skill, but also the sad truth that his prose often feels effortful, and his characters often feel pounded thin beneath the bluntness of his effort.

The apostrophe to the beloved, and to the work that novelists do, concludes that “I knew I must not give in to self-pity. . . . She had been mine for a time, and now she was gone. Gone, but alive, in whatever form life might have taken for her, and from the start that was supposed to be my task: to give her life.” Banville, a most intelligent writer for whom other writers have the highest respect, has here given not life, but the seeming-life of other books. He has in the past given us superb fiction that did, surely, live. And it is with the deepest respect that I await his next brave voyage out.