A former Nazi skinhead making a half-hearted attempt to turn his life around.

	"A CHANGED MAN" By Francine Prose HarperCollins ($24.95)

A fatuous and insecure Holocaust survivor who heads a prestigious nonprofit organization dedicated to world peace and brotherly love.

An overworked, underloved single mother of two who keeps them both out of the deep end.

All these in cynical New York City, right now, during the heyday of the post-PC-backlash revolution.

This is the world you walk into when you open Francine Prose's new novel. The author's previous books have earned her a strong reputation for cutting-edge social commentary, and her latest is a perfect example of why.

Vincent Nolan is a tattooed, painkiller-popping shiftless thirty-something when he decides to leave the Aryan Resistance Movement to join World Brotherhood Watch.

By his own admission, Nolan didn't -- and doesn't -- believe in either group's cause. He is simply going from a standard-issue meal ticket to the caviar-and-champagne plan.

Meyer Maslow, the founder of World Brotherhood Watch, and his right-arm fund-raiser, Bonnie Kalen, immediately bring Nolan into their fold and into their PR strategy.

He tells them he has left everything he knows to come to the foundation and "help save guys like [him] from becoming guys like [him]."

Nolan gets on the foundation's payroll and a place in Kalen's comfortable suburban home with her two adolescent sons. In short, he's in.

What makes the premise of this novel pop is that the reader can't tell who is buying what, and how much of it. The arrangement appeals to the loftiest ideals held by the foundation: "Peace through change" and "One heart at a time."

Yet neither Kalen nor Maslow is blind to the wonders Nolan could do for their waning flow of donations.

For his part, Nolan is none too sincere about his dramatically staged change of heart. Now, bathed in the love, affection and fawning attention of the foundation and its contributors, he's being interviewed by New York Times reporters and appearing on daily talk shows.

As Nolan enters Kalen's life and home, he inevitably turns her not-so-happy soccer-mom world upside-down. The most interesting part of this is the relationship he develops with her sons, Max and Danny.

Max is a painfully optimistic 12-year-old who can't quite detach himself from his mother's apron strings. Danny is a sullen 16-year-old with a very regular pot habit.

Nolan's arrival at once frightens, enrages and delights the boys. A male figure! Not a cookie-cutter! Someone to make their mother smile! For Danny, a smoking buddy!

But alas, Prose doesn't make as much of Danny and Max as she should. They are the two most interesting characters in the book, and the only two with whom we're not saturated.

Instead, she overplays her hand in the beginning of the book by revealing all we need to know about Maslow, Kalen and Nolan.

The three main characters, Maslow especially, betray their fatal flaws and ultimate intentions so quickly that the end of the book is really just an over-worded tie-up of their various hopes and desires.

Chekhov said that if a loaded gun is to appear on stage, it must be fired by the end of the play. Prose makes the mistake of either firing her guns too early or else not at all.

Yet, the author writes with one of the sharpest eyes in the business. From the first page, readers will know that they're in excellent hands with regard to tone and diction.

Her characters and settings are drawn with the kind of shameful honesty that brings Tom Wolfe to mind, but this may also be the downfall of the novel. She delves so unflinchingly into her characters' psychologies that the reader will begin to suffocate.

The world of a novel should contain the world of its characters, not be enveloped by them. The reader is left wanting a simple eye for the story. A witness.

The novel could still save itself were it not for its saccharine-sweet conclusion. The closing scene takes place at a high school graduation, with Kalen and Nolan as the keynote speakers. It is too triumphant, too momentous an occasion for our last pages with these characters.

This is not a hard read, but it's not a comfortable one either. There is no safe haven for a reader amidst these fully drawn characters.

The author clearly wants to make her readers look more closely at their world, and she succeeds. Just mind the eyestrain.