FICTION : CHICAGO LOOP <i> by Paul Theroux (Random House: $20; 196 pp.).</i>

Parker Jagoda is a Chicago developer who specializes in gutting and renovating old buildings while leaving their exterior brickwork intact. He has done the same thing with his life. The facade still stands--marriage, baby, BMW, a fastidious health-food diet, the ability to be shocked by Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos--but Jagoda’s interior has been converted into a singles bar. He meets his wife for kinky “dates” in a hotel room and, on the side, places personal ads for women willing to submit to violent sex.

Two qualities have always marked Paul Theroux’s fiction: an unusual intelligence and a skepticism about human beings that verges on disgust. In “Chicago Loop,” he lends that skepticism to his anti-hero, Jagoda, whose view is: “People don’t know they’re awful. They think they’re nice.” Jagoda play-acts and manipulates to prove his power; he seems to want to scare people because only then can he feel any compassion for them.

This hunger to be kind is what sets “Chicago Loop” apart from “American Psycho” and other recent fiction about men who brutalize women. Jagoda, like the killer in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” has been conditioned to believe that women control sexual matters; he rationalizes that the young woman he murders--gruesomely enough for newspapers to call him “The Wolfman”--is driving him to it. His reactions afterward, however, are different. At first he blanks out his crime; then he awakens, transformed, to terrible remorse. “The murderer within him was gone . . . he had abandoned Parker and left him to suffer.”

This short novel recalls Theroux’s “Doctor Slaughter,” a much darker work than “Half Moon Street,” the Sigourney Weaver movie that was made of it in 1986. In both stories, the protagonist descends into an inferno of erotic humiliation. Parker, convinced that the law can’t punish him severely enough, roams the slums of Chicago, seeking to undo or expiate his crime. He dresses like a woman to inhabit his victim’s life--complete the loop--and bring similar violence on himself. The conclusion, given what he has been and done, is unexpectedly moving.