BOOKS . . . "MEMOIR FROM ANTPROOF CASE"

The hero of Mark Helprin's new novel (Harcourt Brace; 514 pages; $24) has been, variously, a U. S. fighter pilot, a billionaire, a bank robber, a convicted killer and an inmate in a Swiss sanatorium. But what he is most is a bit of a nut, which he demonstrates principally through his lifelong war against the evils of coffee.TIME critic John Skowsays "If there is a trouble with Helprin's writing, it is that readers may have come by now to expect little more than to be dazzled every few pages....They certainly will be in Antproof, a wonderfully strange and funny novel."