Suburban Diaspora

STERN (191 pp.) -- Bruce Jay Friedman --Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

Behind the sword dancing and cymbal clashing of the bestseller lists, where titles assail the eye from ads and authors assail the ear on panel shows, there are books that glow and grow with a life of their own, "discovered" and talked up by readers rather than literary promoters. Currently sparking such a small-scale chain reaction is a strange and touching little first novel called Stern. It is giving Author Bruce Jay Friedman, 32, who has published some short stories and who works in Manhattan as editor of an adventure magazine, a coterie reputation as a new novelist with an antic imagination and a style to match.

Stern is about being Jewish in a lawn-proud suburb of midcentury, middle-class America. But Stern is no sociological novel. Blurring fact and fantasy, it is funny and sad at the same time in the tradition of the Jewish schlemiel story and the Charlie Chaplin movie.

Dogs & Caterpillars. Stern is a tall, round-shouldered man with fat hands and "pale, spreading hips" whose job is to write descriptive literature on labels. His wife is large-eyed, long-nosed and sexy, his lonely eight-year-old son spends most of his time sucking on a blanket. Stern moves them to the suburbs, buys a house for $23,000, and at once begins to suffer the consequences.

Stern's unfamiliar, spread-out country world seems full of traps and tortures. Night after night, as he makes his way home through a neighboring cluster of houses, two huge dogs vault a fence and savagely escort him, his wrist held wetly in the lead dog's teeth. Caterpillars munch away half of every shrub and tree on the place. "This house has been standing here for thirty years with whole shrubs," Stern moans. "We're in it a month and there are halves."

Worst of all is the man down the road, who refused to let his child play with Stern's ("No playing here for kikes"), and who gave Stern's wife a push that sent her sprawling and may (or may not) have allowed him a look beneath her dress. Fighting the "kike man,'' as Stern thinks of him, becomes a constant obsession; he takes to worrying all day about whether he will have the courage to drive home from the station by the route that leads past the man's house. And when he does, he takes off his glasses to look more formidable. One day he sees the man wearing the jacket of a veterans' organization, and Stern's heart turns over. "It meant the man had come through the worst part of the Normandy campaign, knew how to hold his breath in foxholes for hours at a time and then sneak out to slit a throat in silence. He was skilled as a foot fighter and went always with deadly accuracy to a man's groin."

"A Little Theatrical." Stern develops an ulcer, ''a hairy, coarse-tufted little animal within him that squawked for nourishment," and is sent to a nightmarish rest home populated by a brilliant set of grotesques that might be right out of Hieronymus Bosch. Stern emerges to have a nervous breakdown, which Author Friedman manages to make both hugely comic and horrendously real.

The novel's only important lapse is its denouement--the fight with the kike man, which is written as if Friedman were trying to compose an allegory. When the man clobbers him on the ear, Stern "thrills with joy at still being alive," then feels "a warm shudder of sympathy for the man, who had been unable to knock him unconscious with the blow." He walks bloodily home, purged at first, then puzzled to find that the old fear of his enemy down the road is beginning all over again.

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