AMERICAN PASTORAL.<i> By Philip Roth</i> .<i> Houghton Mifflin: 424 pp., $26</i>

Those two dray horses of American fiction, one dapple and one bay, one Protestant and one Jewish, are still plodding along in odd and paradoxical tandem: the dappled John Updike a step or two before the darker Philip Roth.

A year ago, Updike brought out his American saga, “In the Beauty of the Lilies.” It was evocative and somber. Now Roth comes with his counterpart saga, sardonically entitled “American Pastoral.” It is somber and raging.

Updike killed off his longtime protagonist and story-bearer, Rabbit Angstrom, several years ago, not requiring him for “Lilies.” Nathan Zuckerman is required for “American Pastoral.” Impotent and incontinent after a prostate operation and 70 years old, he has lost some of his obsessions, notably sex, but not his principal one: rage.

Relinquishment is part of Updike’s message. Although Roth has used other voices besides Zuckerman’s (Sabbath, the fearsome ejaculator in “Sabbath’s Theater”), for all of his protagonists, relinquishing is tantamount to annihilation.

Some have seen Zuckerman as an alter-ego for Roth, but it is more accurate and useful to see him as a glove-puppet. Contrivance is evident in a puppet show, but when it is as brilliant as Roth’s, the show is its own world. Whoever Roth may be, Zuckerman, insatiable in argument and judgment--I prevail therefore I am--is one of the memorable figures in contemporary fiction, though perhaps he has been memorable too often and too long.

In “Pastoral,” Zuckerman tugs on a glove-puppet of his own. Unlike Roth’s glove (Zuckerman himself), his cannot withstand the gesticulatory passion of the hand that wields it. It keeps ripping. In fact, Zuckerman’s puppet--a well-meaning, idealistic, assimilated Jew named Seymour Levov--is mounted precisely for the purpose of being ripped.

Swede, as Seymour is nicknamed, is the son of Lou Levov, a Newark, N.J., glove manufacturer who started out with piecework until World War II military orders made him a millionaire. In contrast to Lou, an old-fashioned and wittily chauvinist Jewish liberal, Swede seeks to melt into the American pot.

Fate makes it almost inevitable. Not only was Swede a high school sports legend back in the ‘40s when such a thing was a rarity among the sons of Jewish families, but he is blond and blue-eyed. He had “the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask,” Zuckerman writes.

It is, of course, characteristic of Roth’s narrators to deal in stereotypes that, if reversed (“thick-lipped, expressive Semitic mask”), would be intolerable. The shock effect is intended to trouble--a sharp defensive retort to times when the aforesaid reversal would have been no reversal but simply the way many people talked. By now, it has aged beyond troubling to wearying, from defense to offense.

Zuckerman’s account of Swede begins as a memory of the older schoolmate whom he hero-worshiped. When both men are in their 60s, and Zuckerman has become a celebrated writer, Swede diffidently requests a meeting. There is a hint at some deep trouble. Trouble is oxygen to Zuckerman, but Swede turns out to be bland, upbeat and utterly unrevealing.

There are a few facts. He took over and expanded the glove business, married an Irish American Catholic, moved to an expensive WASP suburb, divorced, remarried and had three sons. Oxygen denied, Zuckerman puts it all aside until 10 years after the meeting. Then, at a reunion, Swede’s vitriolic younger brother reveals the darkness beneath the bland prosperity.

Swede and Dawn, his first wife, had a daughter, Merry, who turned away from her protected and cherishing childhood. She became a rebellious adolescent, a Vietnam War activist and eventually an underground terrorist whose bombs killed four people.

Out of this, Zuckerman finds his material. Never lacking in either artistic or personal arrogance, he appropriates Swede for an incandescent fiction. Its object is to argue the self-defeating folly of trying to assimilate Jewishness into the American mainstream.

The result is fascinating and deliberately wrongheaded: a Zuckerman first draft rent by contradiction and alternative versions. Inspired and obnoxious by turns, it overprints its wavering and uncertain portrait of Swede with a glittering and tumultuous portrait of his creator. The hands are Esau’s but, as was remarked of the artistry of an earlier, biblical Zuckerman, “the voice is Jacob’s.”

Zuckerman’s Swede is both a naive, well-meaning idealist and the scourging interior voice that revenges itself on idealism. He marries Dawn Dwyer because she is lovable, Irish Catholic and Miss New Jersey in the Miss America pageant. Swede’s grandfather immigrated to America; he will complete this move by immigrating to inside-America on this three-lane royal highway (Roth’s exuberant irony never confines itself to a single lane).

They buy a 200-year-old stone house on 100 wooded acres in an idyllic, picture-postcard community. Swede loves the general store with its quaint sub-post office, the country characters who hang out there and its American flag. He loves the trees, the flowers, the birds. He may be the first major Roth character to revel in nature and the mystical beauty of light--in short, in the American pastoral of the title. And what, we may wonder, is this would-be Updike character doing here? He is here to be punished; Zuckerman sees to it.

He devises an impossibly endearing little Merry: fey, wise and passionately loved (at one point, among his myriad torments, Swede wonders if he’s been too passionate). Then she develops a stutter, grows fat, slovenly, rebellious. For Zuckerman, speaking through Swede, this is no normal adolescent mess but cruel judgment on the assimilating delusion. The bombing and Merry’s disappearance are more such judgment. So are Dawn’s nervous breakdown and, on recovering, her affair with a WASP neighbor. No mere adultery for Zuckerman; it has to be race hatred. His Swede goes into a fugue state, an obsessive mix of hallucination and reality.

A sinister witch-woman spews hatred on Merry’s behalf, attempts to seduce him and finally leads him to her. He finds his daughter living, filthy and near starvation, in her extremist version of a Hindu sect. If her political radicalism, terrorism and hatred had felt to him like anti-Semitic punishment, her benevolent serenity is an even worse affront. None of this is narratively fixed. Zuckerman tries on alternative, swirling hells for his protagonist. Hell is not other people: It is oneself and one’s guilt for betraying tradition.

“You wanted Miss America?” crows Swede’s angry brother. “Well, you’ve got her with a vengeance--she’s your daughter.”

“American Pastoral” scintillates with more Rothian wit, paradox, eloquent tantrums and absurd pratfalls placed at the exit of each irresistible argument than can be counted. In embattlement and the old matrix of persecution, he strikes a vivid blaze. Outside it (another Roth characteristic) stand one or two wonderfully human survivors; in this case, Swede’s wife and, despite his own obsessions, his father.

Yet Roth’s recent books, for all their ingenious fever, are growing a leaden shell. The battling is increasingly forced and overtaken by time. “American Pastoral,” set mainly from the ‘40s to the ‘70s, is not an opening but a closing. It is Zuckerman fighting his Great War at his one-man veterans’ reunion.