Out, Out, Brief Cigarette : THE CONVERSIONS <i> by Harry Mathews (Carcanet Press: $8.50, paper; 182 pp.) </i> : TLOOTH <i> by Harry Mathews (Carcanet Press: $8.50, paper; 188 pp.) </i> : CIGARETTES <i> by Harry Mathews: (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $16.95; 288 pp.) </i>

“Cigarettes” is Harry Mathews’ fourth novel, his first in 12 years. It follows “The Conversions” (1962) and “Tlooth” (1966), both now resurrected from out-of-print oblivion by the same publisher that recently also reissued Mathews’ third novel, “The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium” (1975). That early trio of books can now be seen as a unit, and probably a closed chapter in the novelist’s career.

Certainly their shared characteristics make them unique in American fiction. A blend of wild intellectual comedy and bizarre fantasy, arcane data and flamboyant verbal gamesmanship, they are disarming and delightful works with few precedents in the language. If “Tristram Shandy,” “Finnegans Wake” and Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books perhaps broke some ground for the early Mathews, one must search beyond the bounds of English for closer analogies. Borges and Calvino, to whom Mathews has been compared, were never this weird; and Raymond Roussel, the turn-of-the-century herald of French surrealism (“Impressions of Africa,” “Locus Solus”) from whom Mathews did indeed borrow the anti-referential, language-playing elements of his early style, was never quite this funny.

In “The Conversions,” Mathews sets his narrator-hero off on a hopeless intercontinental problem-solving quest that involves retrieving a “golden adze” (whose confusing figuration he must somehow decipher) and responding to several Zen-like riddles in order to inherit an enormous fortune bequeathed by a mischievously nutty millionaire (who reminds us a little of God, and a little of the novelist himself). The theme of inheritance is one readers will run across again in “Cigarettes,” where it’s explored in much greater depth as a factor in human behavior. Here it’s merely a mechanical device, employed to trigger a hilarious wild-goose-chase of a plot.

A close cousin in form to “The Conversions,” “Tlooth” is a picaresque tale of escape and revenge that begins in a Siberian gulag called Jacksongrad and winds its uproariously unlikely way through Afghanistan, India and Morocco before ending up in France (a country this New York-native author has taken as his part-time home, even as he’s taken its 20th-Century writings as his prime models).

The self-enclosed verbal performance of “The Conversions” and “Tlooth” strains linguistic reference to its limit, creating a subjective universe in which the mind’s ceaseless inventiveness runs up against an opaque barrier of “facts” and “words.” Mathews’ heroes are detectives of the absurd who don’t realize they’re trapped in this baffling puzzle-universe; the task the novelist has assigned them is to discover and investigate a world that gradually reveals itself to be a compound delusion. In “Cigarettes,” this tragic joke turns unexpectedly into something that for all its elegance, sophistication and irony looks suspiciously like real tragedy.

For “Cigarettes” is about nothing less than the built-in impossibility of human relationships. Our addictive drive to know and understand each other not only consumes us, Mathews seems to be saying in his new novel, but does so with as little real meaning as the consumption, one by one, of cigarettes from a pack: flaring glow, some smoke, and then gone. The only truth perceptible by the light of this brief flame is that subjectively tilted “deformed truth” defined so well by Freud as the product of wishful thinking; trapped inside the mirror-filled halls of their wishful illusions, Mathews’ characters struggle valiantly but unsuccessfully to relate, each speaking a language of Self that may sound clear but ultimately proves as unintelligible to the surrounding selves as Esperanto to a Martian.

At first glance, the new novel appears as conventional as its predecessors are exotic: Gone are the maps, charts, diagrams, musical scores, acrostics, puzzles and word games that make the early books resemble brain-teaser kits for occupying child prodigies on prolonged car trips. This time around Mathews’ fantasy and bizarrerie give way to a surface realism not too different from what you might encounter in a New Yorker short story. Even as I use the words Mathews and realism in the same sentence, though, I race to qualify. The “Cigarettes” characters dwell in a super-Elysium of money and class that may not actually exist on this Earth, even in the extremely well-heeled slice of it that Mathews commands as his setting: a thin strip extending from Manhattan’s downtown financial district and artists’ enclaves through its uptown galleries and watering holes to the “horse-and-dog-world” of the upper reaches of the Hudson. All along this circuit, the blood and the chips run a deep patrician blue. A young woman’s clothes are by “Mainbocher, or perhaps Rochas”; lunch is taken “at the Polo Lounge, in the Westbury.” These are people for whom wealth is “like the moon in the sky or the trees in the woods,” an ambiance that surrounds them “too naturally ever to be thought about”--except, of course, as a means to control each other’s lives.

Mathews dedicates “Cigarettes” to the late French novelist Georges Perec. Like Perec’s 1978 masterpiece “La Vie Mode D’Emploi,” this novel gradually unfolds through a series of interlocking tales, revealing its essence only in progressive skin-of-the-onion stages. Each of its 14 short-story-like chapters pairs off two of its 13 main characters, and chapter by chapter these characters rotate positions, forming an increasingly incestuous ring of relationships whose shape keeps changing before our eyes. The focus of Mathews’ relentless ingenuity, source of so many dazzling comic moments in the earlier books, is here transferred from the verbal surface to the plot architecture. He weaves into each of his several story-threads more unexpected twists than you’ll find in the average multivolume Victorian novel.

“Cigarettes” is a brilliant and unsettling book that turns on a typically Mathewsian paradox. Here this erstwhile master of High Nonsense has made himself surprisingly comprehensible in order to illuminate humanity’s general state of mutual incomprehension; he has written a novel that’s like a message-in-a-bottle proposing that all messages--even art’s--are lost from the moment they are composed, because each is inscribed in the self’s special subjective language. This paradox at the heart of the novel makes his characters’ struggles at once pathetic and heroic.

If there is a God in Harry Mathews’ universe, it is the joker-deity of comedie noir , continually winding people up to embark on the impossible--whether it be finding a golden adze or relating without deception to each other. After each predictable failure, he chuckles behind his hand and then winds them up to start again. The beauty of these novels is that we get to share the joke even while realizing it’s on us.