BOOK REVIEW : Blinded by the Light of Reality and Truth : THE DISCOVERY OF LIGHT, <i> by J. P. Smith,</i> Viking, $19, 222 pages

“The Discovery of Light” takes a little getting used to. The jacket’s material suggests that this novel “reads like a collaboration between Paul Auster and Alfred Hitchcock,” but there’s a great deal of Pirandello in this tale.

If J. P. Smith has not seen or read the work of Richard Murfett, he has a spiritual cousin in the epileptic Australian playwright who saw life as a series of brightly lit frames of stop-time in the ordinary chronology by which we usually define our existence.

The narrator here, David Reid, lives in a quiet New England cottage, teaches English at a small college of art in the mornings and in the afternoons writes novels that, as he modestly tells us, nobody reads.

On a trip to England, David meets Kate, his editor, who wants more than anything else to translate books from French into English. David marries Kate--a beautiful, aloof blonde--and takes her back to his New England home. They are happy--she seems happy--but after 18 months she becomes increasingly sad. Then one day she steps in front of a subway train in New York City and is crushed.

David is devastated. He’s already had bad luck with women; Kate was his second wife. But, truth be told, he seems to bumble a bit in the realms of reality. David can’t seem to pay attention to what happens in real life.

Over the years he has created a structured, rarefied world of art, made up of Bach partitas and museum visits. He thinks lofty thoughts: “Where is the truth? Is it somewhere between the eye and its reflection, in some unseen middle distance, midway between the flat polished surface of the mirror and the glossy convexity of the lens? Or perhaps at the point at which world and word meet as one?”

Meanwhile, poor David has failed to notice that Kate has been having an affair for months with Marc Rougemont, the French novelist whose work she has allegedly been translating. So maybe Kate’s death wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was suicide. Maybe murder.

To David, life appears as a series of static portraits. He’s obsessed with the work of Vermeer and spends his time meditating on certain of his paintings, particularly the one of a woman weighing pearls and gold.

All of Vermeer’s work is sacred, it seems, because it bathes the ordinary moments of daily life in the brilliant light of the artist’s eye. No matter how dull our own daily lives, they may be seen as framed and illuminated. Every window in every hotel is filled, for instance, with light, plot, character, action. We have only to look , to pay attention, to see.

With these lofty thoughts in mind, David very easily (and stupidly) falls for a scheming hussy named Denise who looks a good deal like Kate. Wouldn’t you know that Denise has also been having an affair with that fancy French novelist and that she has her own irate husband chasing after her?

Life gets repetitive. Many paintings are very much alike. Vermeer used his own wife as a model in picture after picture, wearing different guises.

As David himself would muse, life is “frames within frames.”

While the consolation of lofty thoughts gets David through his life (“Sometimes I wondered if life was a weave of echo and reflection: Words and images forming patterns across the years, creating the texture of memory; hinting at some greater matrix”), in real life the characters he knows are hobbled by the banalities of language: “I love it when you do that,” amorous partners repeat to each other over and over.

“The Discovery of Light” is for those readers who believe that the only real variety is in art, that our only redemption is in art. We are all dishearteningly replaceable, J. P. Smith implies, and, indeed, his hero manages to go through four remarkably similar ladies in a little more than 200 pages.

The universe spits out artistic females like Pepsi-Cola bottles in a Pepsi-Cola bottle factory. There is a tension here between subject and object. The artist is the one who defines, the one in control; perhaps only the artist really is indispensable.

In a rather startling lack of humility, David appears to compare himself to Proust as well as to Vermeer and blithely dismisses the fact that he will never really understand his wives or his mistresses; they are, after all, essentially “images.”

For those who pine for the immutable consolations of art, “The Discovery of Light” is an enlightening text.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Simple Living: One Couple’s Search for a Better Life” by Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska (Viking).