CUT FROM A DEEPER CLOTH

By Paul Gray

PERHAPS BECAUSE IT IS WRITTEN with college-educated book buyers in mind, literary fiction these days teems with nice, sensible characters. Oh, sure, they have problems: their marriages turn drab, their careers seem stalled, all their good intentions cannot protect them from the knowledge that they are, every day, growing older. Their response to these travails tends to involve exhaustive introspection and maybe a psychiatrist or a hobby to snap them out of their blahs. They are as harmless as they are uninteresting.

At first glance, the heroine-narrator of Susanna Moore's fourth novel, In the Cut (Knopf; 180 pages, $21), seems to fit perfectly into the polite cast of contemporary fiction. Frannie Thorstin, 34, lives on Washington Square in lower Manhattan, where the ghost of Henry James still whispers to the sensitive. She teaches creative writing in a city program for teenagers "of what is called low achievement and high intelligence." She is also writing a book on dialects and regional slang, particularly as they occur in the five boroughs of New York City. She notes, "The words themselves--in their wit, exuberance, mistakenness and violence--are thrilling to me."

Underscore violence and thrilling. For the terms Frannie collects from her students and from eavesdropping on subways and sidewalks cluster around two subjects: female body parts (gangsters, n: breasts, as in "Them two gangsters be with her all the time") and weapons. "A dangerous combination for me," she muses. "Language and passion."

Frannie stumbles into trouble. In a basement room of a bar she happens to see a red-haired woman--whose murder will be reported later that night--performing a sex act on a man whose face is in shadow. But he, she suspects, will recognize her. Sure enough, she is soon visited by N.Y.P.D. Detective James A. Malloy, who has a tattoo on his wrist similar to one she noticed on the man in the bar. "You remind me of someone," he tells her.

If this were a movie, the background score would start its subliminal scream at about this point. But Moore's novel is both more complicated than the standard Hollywood thriller and more disturbing. Frannie is alarmed by Malloy's attention but much more strongly attracted to his macho presence. When he takes her to a bar for more questions about the murder, it dawns on her that she is trying to make herself attractive to him: "I was a little worried when I realized that it was more than wanting him to like me. I realized that I wanted to be like him."

Why? What draws Frannie to a man who tells her, among other things, that "there's not too much I haven't done" and "cops go through girlfriends like they go through veal cutlets"? She tries, in the best modern fashion, to intellectualize her desires: "One of the things that interests me about sex is that it is a conspiracy of improvised myths. Very effective in evoking forbidden or hidden wishes." But she knowingly places herself in increasingly mortal danger.

In the Cut proceeds along the path of conventional thrillers. Tension proliferates, as do false clues and bloodshed. But Moore refuses to apply the veneer of glamour that ordinarily gives this genre its commercial sheen. The language and the sex scenes are blunt, graphic and definitely not to everyone's taste. The last few pages make for extraordinarily painful reading. But this novel poses questions--about the irrational, the perverse--that tap fiction's deepest potential, a mysterious realm well beyond the consolations of a hobby or a shrink.