Theft as Therapy

HECK by Morris Renek. 278 pages. Harper's Magazine Press. $6.50.

Morris Renek is one of those rare novelists with the ability to take overly familiar scenes of city life and infuse them with fresh vitality. In The Big Hello, he explored with remarkable humor a middle-aged Jew's bumbling attempt at divorce. In Siam Miami, the passionate subject was a stardom-bound girl singer's fight against the sleazy power brokers of pop music. In his third novel, Renek tackles with gusto yet another conventional modern situation--a young man's rage against life in the ghetto. This one happens to be the old-fashioned Jewish ghetto, not the black variety.

Heck is his name. Although he has a decent but routine job in Manhattan, Heck is scarred by the memory of childhood injustices suffered before World War II in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. "The glory about the melting pot is a myth," say Heck. "Too many melted into whatever it took to get ahead." Tormented by the need for some kind of psychological revenge, he decides to rob a Williamsburg bank, to steal back that part of himself stolen by the ghetto. It is a pure case of grand larceny as grand therapy.

Attempting to thwart him in that ambition and salvage him in the process is Lola, the bright, pretty, redheaded daughter of a policeman. Romantically attracted by Heck's violence, she desperately tries to erase it with passion.

Hoping to foil his plan, Lola also alerts all the banks in his old neighborhood, and even the police. Heck pulls off the job anyway. His eventual doom and/or salvation is decided by Lola's implacably honest father.

In bringing life to this rather threadbare theme, Renek is spare, painful and hilariously funny. Heck's bank heist, his hair-raising rooftop and back-alley escape, not to mention a rollicking love scene with Lola in a huge beer vat, unroll with a vitality that can only be de scribed as up-to-date Dickensian. For Heck, the future is ambiguous. But Renek's account of his hero's battle with the dehumanizing forces of modern cit ies is a small but notable literary victory.

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