BOOK REVIEW : Classic Romance Between Youth, Old Age : GLAD RAGS <i> by MacDonald Harris</i> , Story Line Press $21.95, 336 pages

The question that arises after reading “Glad Rags,” MacDonald Harris’ new novel, is, Why isn’t this author better known? Having published 14 novels, one of which, “The Balloonist,” was nominated for a National Book Award in 1976, he is no newcomer to the literary scene.

“Glad Rags,” his 15th novel, is a charming, well-written story, one that brings to mind the work of English writer Muriel Spark and Australian novelist Elizabeth Jolley. All three authors share the qualities of great wit and intellect.

“Glad Rags” tells the story of Ben Gavilan, a middle-aged ex-publisher from Santa Barbara with a withered arm (the result of childhood polio), a cultured mind, and a taste for luxury who, after experiencing a startling premonition, falls swiftly and hopelessly in love with a woman half his age only to discover that he must deal with the soul-wrenching consequences.

Cecilia Penn is a talented harpsichordist and Berkeley student who is working as a waitress in an old hotel in the Sierra when Ben meets her. The lithe, youthful Cecilia, her hair braided with flowers, leggy and lovely in her hiking shorts, bowls Ben over.

He’s flummoxed by the intensity of his attraction, which is reciprocated to the degree that Cecilia, after making love to him in a cave during a rain-soaked hike, quits her waitress job and returns with him to Santa Barbara, where they set up house in the swank suburb of Montecito and immediately become fair game for ridicule by Ben’s set of older, jaded rich friends, who meet each Wednesday night at the house of an eccentric Russian novelist name Ilya Vornoff for drinks, music and a little mudslinging.

With friends like these, poor Ben certainly doesn’t need enemies.

Cecilia certainly makes a good stab at holding her own in this company, but Ilya, who likes to manipulate people in real life as characters in fiction, thinks she and Ben are making fools of themselves, as does his alcoholic wife, Betsey, and Ethel, Ben’s librarian friend (an Edith Sitwell look-alike) with whom he’s shared mild romantic feelings. There’s a kind of fraudulence about this group.

Set against their pomposity and intellectual pretensions, Cecilia and Ben appear naive and vulnerable. They’re both love-ridden babes in a manic, nasty wonderland. In order to deflect criticism, Ben concocts a story that he’s only interested in helping Cecilia to further her musical studies--an assertion no one believes.

It’s one of the cruel truths of romance that what appears invincible in the inky depths of the bedroom can often wither in the harsh light of day.

While his “ vita nuova “--the new life with Cecilia--awakens Ben’s senses and perceptions (particularly his sexual appetite, which has gone unwhetted since his divorce 10 years earlier), Ben finds himself tormented by jealousy, threatened by younger men who “make him break out in a cold sweat” if they so much as come near Cecilia: “He had been a person who was able to possess his soul in peace: now he was in a Dostoyevskian turmoil and there was no peace.”

Also troubling is Cecilia’s undecipherable personality: “She was a staggering combination of the transparent and the enigmatic . . . there was a mysterious core, black as night.”

We’re not quite sure throughout much of the novel who’s the tempter and who’s the tempted: Is Cecilia milking Ben for the new harpsichord she wants, and which they eventually make a trip to England to buy? Or is Ben a lecherous old goat, sad and deluded, corrupting youth out of pure lust?

Youth and old age are the real subjects of this novel--as well as the “mysteriousness” of women:

“Somehow they, the young, know all about us,” muses Ben, “and see through us and know exactly what we’re like and what we’re feeling, but they’re a mystery to us. They live in another country, a foreign country where the old are not admitted. Even though we’ve been there, we’ve forgotten, or we’re unable to recover the memory precisely because we’ve been there and you can only go there once.”

Is Ben’s love folly or a necessary part of relinquishing desire--”the physical thing,” as he calls it--in favor a higher, more selfless connection to Cecilia? We intuit the story’s ending (it’s one of the book’s minor flaws) and wish things might turn out differently for Ben. He’s such an odd combination of savvy and innocence.

Yet he seems spectral at the end, a fading and fallen lover, lonely, and yet grateful “to something, to the universe or to the God he didn’t believe in, for these things that had happened to him, for his grief, for his love, for his story that he himself did not understand.”

Harris’ gifts, which include a fine storyteller’s sensibility and astonishing erudition (whole plots are recounted here--”Wild Duck,” “Hedda Gabler”--and we get nice smatterings of Pascal, Moliere and Chekov) make “Glad Rags” a winning book.

Harris may be a curiously undervalued author, but he nevertheless stands out quietly in a weedy and sometimes overblown literary landscape.