The 'Fall' Guy

Toward the end of Robert Hellenga's novel The Fall of a Sparrow (Scribner, $25), there's a moment of feverish Dostoyevskian intensity as its hero, Alan ''Woody'' Woodhull, an Illinois college professor, confronts a young Italian woman in a Roman prison cell. She's the defiant neo-fascist terrorist who back in 1980 had planted a bomb in the Bologna railroad station that killed 86 people, including Woody's daughter, Cookie, then 22. It's a moment dense with danger, guilt, revenge, redemption, and the eminent ghosts of modern philosophy and modern political madness. But the rest of the novel is written in a different key. It's an elegant, elegiac, occasionally comic account of an extended midlife crisis. Hellenga's previous novel was The Sixteen Pleasures, and in this one, which has a cultivated epicurean texture, he comes up with another 16 or so, including food (lots of recipes and menus summoning up landmark meals); sex (A to Z encyclopedic, with a brazen Iranian student, the daughter of a woman Woody had a consoling affair with after Cookie's death); literature (quotes and quandaries from the Greek and Latin classics Woody teaches in a small backwater college); blues (he plays a mean National Steel guitar); plus disquisitions on bats, Persian carpets, Italian manners, and Illinois glacial topography.

The theme of coming to terms with Cookie's death doesn't exactly get lost. It gathers momentum, taking on the weight of memory and Woody's relations with his other two daughters and his wife, who has withdrawn into a convent. But as a detailed portrait of an aging, questing man on the far side of the '60s generation, the novel can't avoid a certain smugness. It sometimes seems like a celebration of the superior taste of someone whose folksy-liberal credentials are in order and who wins easy victories over dour feminists and stuffy officials. Luckily, there's more to it than that: autumnal prose, a playful intellectual curiosity, and a decent, disillusioned, all-embracing tenderness. A-