I'D LIKE TO forget that beneath the jacket of this book the initials "PR" are emblazoned into the cover, like a Brooks Brothers bathrobe, or a towel set. I would like to not care who Philip Roth is, whether or not he has earned the license to write a novel so apparently decadent and outrageous, or whether this is the appropriate follow-up to a story about a gargantuan sci-fi mammary gland. The Great American Novel is certainly utterly bereft of Greatness, but it is great in the way that Tony the Tiger intones the word. And it is not, as some have intimated, the pretentious and self-indulgent product of a jaded literary titan who has nothing better to do than write the Great American Conceit. Roth has asked for it -- he can probably afford to lay himself open to this kind of facile speculation. But for once let the context be forgot, not only because one could make a case for a peculiarly redemptive humility of tone in the novel, but just on general principles. References to Mesopotamian mythology and Joseph Conrad don't detract from the fact that this is a hell of a baseball book, and I'd rather hear a Brooklyn Dodger fan than a professor on this one.

The narrator of this breezy, anecdotal saga is no Portnoy, and it's easy to forget that any complaint was ever made, because the irony is irony with an option -- it is camp in the best sense, convincing enough to let the reader drop the bemused distance at will. The storyteller is a "fella name a' Smith; first name a' Word." Word Smith is a sagacious, grizzled and altogether senile old sportswriter with a penchant for alliteration and a lively obsession for the American idiomatic phrase. In the heyday of baseball -- the twenties, the thirties, the forties -- Smitty had written a column entitled "One Man's Opinion" for the Finest Family Newspapers chain. He covered the Patriot League, and most particularly the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless team in the history of the game, and later found to be infested with Communists. At the time that Smitty is writing from the Old Folks' Home, all of the above organizations are defunct -- treated as if they never existed, in fact -- and Word sets about reviving them in print.

HE IS THE PERFECT NARRATOR: as a journalist he feels he must be painstaking, as an ambitious writer he can't help showing off the only style he knows -- the kind of style that anyone would resort to after writing about baseball games every day for a generation, and as a rather embittered and sentimental atavist there is passion in his every word. A bundle of fresh caricatures, Smitty can sound like a disgruntled Confederate general, or like William Loeb, the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader who expresses his most exquisite right-wing rage in capital letters. A gossip columnist, a backroom politician, a muckraking Galahad of journalism -- he conjures up images of a fierce American brashness that are endearing and real. Also, and less successfully, he is an echo of a literary past, a Hemingway, a Hawthorne, a Melville, a Twain. This whole side of the book, from the first sentence ("Call me Smitty"), is an interesting diversion -- sometimes witty, but never very impressive, and little more than an academic exercise. What drives the narrative is an indefatigable love for baseball.

However wry Roth is, baseball is a religion in this novel. A ghostly past of Mel Ott, of Honus Wagner, the Folo Grounds, Kenesaw Mountain Landis -- it haunts this book. To Word Smith, it fled with America's innocence. In the bleachers at Fenway the other night, thinking of this, and badly shaken by the rendition of "Knock Three Times" that had just been piped to us at a deafening level, the kid in front of me with the baseball cap began loudly to taunt the center-fielder with the ageless imputation that he bit the dust. This convinced me that all was well -- until he worked into his next chant: a TV commentator imitation.

Baseball is obviously the best dominant metaphor for a book of this kind. It's got everything: pioneer individualism and a territorial imperative much more basic than football's corporate effort; a hockey, circus atmosphere peculiar to the American brand of mass hysteria; a dying smell about it; a system for making heroes in the center spotlight; an evangelical twist. It's got politics and it's got religion.

ROTH, OF COURSE, works in everything else under the sun -- transvestites, midgets and an incredible panoply of solidly imaginative caricatures. All of this, as well as the moral aura surrounding a proud and gentlemanly game debased, is milked for all the socio-cultural comment it's worth. There is a Moby Dick thoroughness about the subject: Roth did a lot of homework in Cooperstown, and there is an ambling love of detail for its own sake that recalls Melville's novel (which, by the way, Roth calls "five hundred pages of blubber"). The innuendoes of the game itself and the episodic richness of the narrative blot out attempts at conventional literary metaphor, as when some players visit a famous brothel peopled by wet-nurses, who sing lullabies for $2.50 a tune. These scenes don't work as "Literature", probably because they're so damn fun to read.

Most of all, then, The Great American Novel is a narrative home run, perhaps over a close left field wall, with no one on base, but a home run nevertheless. Roth takes a myth that everyone knows is destroyed anyway, and picking apart the baseball ethos lovingly, savoring its madness and its magnetism, he betrays an exasperated affection for it that he may not have felt when he began. He leaves us laughing but wistful, smug but reverent, and with a musty, clinging air of ambivalence about lost American dreams. Perhaps it's despair folded over, cynicism gone hysterical, or a commercial fake, but Smitty takes us on a sympathetic journey.