Seized With Rage : A heart patient meditates on the corrosive power of anger : HEART: A Memoir,<i> By Lance Morrow (Warner Books; $22.95; 323 pp.)</i>

When at 36 Lance Morrow suffered his first heart attack, he congratulated himself on his precocity. But when at 53 he was stricken yet again, he responded less glibly. What, he wondered, had predisposed him to such potentially deadly spasms? In “Heart,” his book-length meditation on this question, Morrow proposes that the culprit is rage, not ordinary rage but one that runs so deep “it is genetic, as in the Balkans. The transmission lines trill and trill down the generations, ringing in the ears of children.”

To those familiar with Morrow’s incarnation as Time magazine’s gossamer-spinning resident essayist, such literary leaps are, well, de rigueur. “Heart,” however, is no mere cover-story confection. In a style at once hallucinatory yet concrete, Morrow scours his past for the sources of his anger while simultaneously scanning such war-torn regions as Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Middle East for objective correlatives. “The great elephant,” as he puts it, has “descended and left the indentation of its foot upon my chest. . . . Two heart attacks and two bypass operations--six grafts in all, loops of hosing jury-rigged around my jalopy of a heart.” The man, in short, wants some answers.

“Heart,” then, is a work that gazes both inward and outward. Early on, Morrow invokes a Tibetan spirit called a delok , which according to ancient tradition departs the body of the putatively deceased and roams the earth until returning to its corporeal and surprisingly vital self. With that, Morrow prepares the way for his own free-floating approach. Though “Heart” is for the most part set physically in either the New York City hospital where the author underwent his second surgery or on the Duchess County farm where he recuperated, it actually takes place in a realm liberated from the constraints of time or place. Thus one moment Morrow is describing a fight he overheard years ago between his parents, the next a recent trip to Sarajevo, and the next the gallows humor that prevails among the doctors staffing his coronary care unit.

All this jumping around takes a little getting used to, but within a few pages the appropriateness--even the brilliance--of Morrow’s tack reveals itself. For starters, by writing, as it were, on multiple tracks, he is able to convey the multiple levels of consciousness experienced by a person literally sick at heart. In such a state of mind, everything seems to happen simultaneously--the earnest rifling of family history for clues, the sensitivity to each beat of the faulty pump, the desperate casting about for signs and portents.

Ultimately, though, Morrow is pursuing more than just an effect. He believes there are parallels between his clogged arteries and the world’s. In both cases, he asserts, a heritage of psychic violence and accumulated grievances have occluded “the present moment” and made “the muscle (the life) die.”

Whether Morrow’s thesis would stand up in the lab is uncertain, although with some physicians now claiming that “soulless striving” plays as much a part in causing heart attacks as high cholesterol levels, he may be on to something. At the very least, he makes an interesting argument. Morrow’s family tree is not a happy one. On the paternal side, there are alcoholics. On the maternal, there is a cruel grandfather who turned out Morrow’s mother when she was a teen-ager and whose funeral she did not attend. These are the ghosts Morrow believes haunt his heart. And he sees their analogs in Sarajevo--which shortly before his second attack he visited with Elie Wiesel--and Palestine, which he has covered for Time. Grudge-harboring peoples--like a grudge-harboring heart--are doomed to maniacal outbursts.

Clearly, this is the sort of thinking a writer can take only so far, and sadly, Morrow doesn’t know when to stop. A section of “Heart” in which he tries to relate the Caribbean’s bloody political history to his bad ticker feels tacked on, existing solely because a magazine assignment took him to the region. Moreover, as boldly as Morrow faces the demons bequeathed him by his parents, he skirts those of his own making. He mentions a divorce and a propensity for drink, but like a good WASP, he avoids the messy facts.

Yet whatever its lapses, “Heart” is by any measure a triumph, a transfusion of rich images and insights. Here, one learns that a heat attack begins as a “toxic interior glow . . . a kind of terrible foretaste . . . that something is about to change.” Here, one comes to appreciate why a convalescing heart-attack patient might experience the “adrenal panic rising” at the prospect of a simple quarter-mile walk on a frosty night. And here, one finds a surprising amount of dark gossip. Particularly compelling is Morrow’s account--authoritatively passed down to him from his father, who served as Nelson Rockefeller’s press secretary--of Rocky’s fatal infarction in the arms of his mistress.

“Heart,” in other words, is a great pleasure to read, a work that is by turns enlightening, elegiac, and devilish. At his best, Morrow writes with both economy and evocativeness, putting one in mind of the novelist James Salter (“Light Years”). His sentences, their sobering subject matter notwithstanding, fall into the mind like snowflakes. He intends to entrance--and he does.

Finally, however, what is most moving about “Heart” is Morrow’s bravery. Near the book’s conclusion, he describes a long car trip he and his wife take to celebrate his recovery. Someplace in Texas, they visit a beautiful, 800-foot-deep canyon. Peering over the edge, Morrow feels a clutching in his chest--a clutching made all the more urgent because he’s recently learned that a colleague, Time drama critic William Henry, has dropped dead of a heart attack. Terrified, Morrow is briefly frozen at the precipice. Only by the greatest exertion of will can he crawl away on his hands and knees. After all his theoretical exertions fade, Morrow’s account of this moment lingers. Not because it was so humbling--though it was because it was so ennobling. “Heart,” in short, is the genuine testament of a man who has not only looked into the abyss but knows it could open up beneath him again at any second.