Like muscle cars and bomber jackets, they don't make them like Philip Caputo anymore. Born near Chicago, educated in Vietnam and tutored in fiction by war zones, he is the face of American storytelling from the frontlines.

		"ACTS OF FAITH" By Philip Caputo Knopf. ($26.95)

While John Updike stayed home and wrote about life in suburbia, Caputo reported from Beirut in the 1970s, hung out in the Hindu Kush in the '80s and traveled across Africa in the '90s.

Caputo has written five novels based on these experiences, turning out some of the most interesting adventure-driven literary fiction of the past two decades.

His latest, big-block V-8 of a novel might just be his most ambitious yet.

The action unfolds before the backdrop of Sudan's grueling and costly civil war, which reached a peak in the 1990s, when the Khartoum-backed Muslim government took to bombing parts of the Christian or animist south. The United Nations was not very effective at relieving this humanitarian crisis.

Into this breach step characters like Douglas Braithwaite, a swaggering American aviator who claims to have flown in the first Gulf War and wants to bring his experience to the current quagmire.

His idea is to fly humanitarian aid into regions where the U.N. won't go -- and make money at it, of course.

As in his other novels, from "Delcorso's Gallery" to "Horn of Africa," the warping of good intentions is Caputo's great subject here, and romantic interactions only complicate things further.

A Braithwaite partner is a multi-ethnic former Kenyan soccer star named Fitzhugh Martin, who falls in love with a white Anglo-Kenyan whose family's money backs the whole enterprise.

An evangelical from Iowa named Quinette Hardin marries a leader from the People's Liberation Army and becomes a passionate believer in armed resistance.

Suddenly, to Quinette and to others, shipments of food and medical supplies don't feel like enough.

This question of what is enough intervention, and what visitation rights Westerners assume around the world, is something Caputo has been chewing on for three decades now. The concern first came to him (as it did to much of the American left) through Vietnam, where Caputo served in the Marines in the '60s.

In three years of service, however, Caputo transformed from a gung-ho adventure-seeker into a ruthless killer, an evolution he chronicled in his classic memoir "A Rumor of War."

His new novel seems destined to be every bit as much a generation-defining book. If "A Rumor of War" painted a blisteringly intimate portrait of an American awakening to the moral complications of doing his patriotic duty, "Acts of Faith" calls into the question the benevolence -- and moral complexity -- of any kind of intervention in foreign affairs, even when motivated by the idea of doing good.

What's impressive is that Caputo manages to get us thinking about these issues without ever shoe horning a lecture into each chapter.

He braids history into the narrative without us even realizing it, allowing it to rise up in the consequences to characters' actions, rather than the tenor or texture of their speech.

As a result, "Acts of Faith" is probably Caputo's most free-wheeling and deliciously crafted book yet. The sentences come fast and furious, like haymakers from on high. Subtlety is not the strongest key in his register, but then again, Africa is not a subtle place.

It's a continent where the sun rises "without any gradual color-splashed ascent, just an abrupt burst of equatorial light," as one of Caputo's characters observes.

This image also aptly describes what seems likely to happen to Caputo's star after this virtuoso performance. It will shoot right into the sky. And like the sun in Africa, we just might forget how long he's been around.