Some so-called novels of ideas come to resemble fantasies in the musical sense, fantasias of capricious impressions, coming and going: The ideas flit and fly more than they land. Nicholas Mosley, the third Baron of Ravensdale, is reputedly one of the great British novelists of ideas, and his new novel, “Look at the Dark” (Dalkey Archive, 214 pages, $13.95), makes an explicit case for this kind of mental turbulence and indecision.

The unnamed narrator, an old academic, thinks of his disorganized life thus: “I was the projectionist and for most of the time the director, but I did not think I played all that big a part as scriptwriter or producer because scripts and logistics came ready-made from the world outside.” His sense of confusion is one part privilege, one part befuddlement, one part paranoia, one part personal philosophy. His privilege confuses him because so much is done for him, without his knowledge. His befuddlement derives from a recent hitand-run accident, which his paranoia attributes to any of several governmental agencies – the academic has made a hobby of saying scandalous things about Middle East relations on television. This political part of the novel is neither cogent nor absurd enough to entertain, perhaps because Mr. Mosley ultimately champions apolitical skepticism.

The title “Look in the Dark” contains the narrator’s philosophy: “What was being learnt, it seemed to me, was that to find one’s way in almost any circumstances one had to in quire, to question, to keep an open mind, as if one were in the dark; it was in the light that one reacted automatically according to prejudice and easy assumptions.”

What could be a pop reassurance – “Oh, confusion helps” – becomes for Mr. Mosley an inspiration. The narrator, in conversation with his grown-up son, compares their dialogue to a steeplechase, pretending to bemoan its ever-changing goals and conventions. But he obviously relishes his son’s wit and the mutually recognized indeterminacy of their relationship.

The more he confuses himself, the more he understands confusion. In trying to puzzle through global politics, he discovers not an underlying logic but an underlying humor – call it grace, irony, or, as he puts it, kinkiness. He is fond of “the Jewish myth”: “The seven just men who don’t know each other and don’t themselves know what they are, but who keep the world on course.” He appends his own philosophy: that the wise man, in not knowing what he does, must still be witty.”Look at the Dark” carries a whiff of quixotic noblesse oblige: What art form other than the novel should dare to treat current world affairs so playfully?

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The reissue of James Schuyler’s “What’s for Dinner?” (NYRB, 211 pages, $14) brings to light a classic that hardly had a chance to be recognized as such when it was originally published by Black Sparrow Press in 1978. Looking back, “What’s for Dinner?” occupies a fascinating place in American literature, covering the same territory as Cheever or Updike – America decides to go ahead and be unfaithful – but where these masters seem to be living through the crisis, Schuyler is wonderfully light and abstracted. To put it another way, this novel resembles what Frank O’Hara would have come up with had he written a conventional novel about small towns. It’s that brisk and that human.

Schuyler was a pillar of the socalled New York School of poets, with O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Associated with the Poets Theater in Cambridge, Mass., these poets learned a thrill for dialogue that can be seen even in Mr. Ashbery’s poems. This from “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”: ” ‘M’love,’ he intercepted, ‘the plains are decked out in thunder / Today, and it shall be as you wish.’ “

Schuyler’s two stand-alone novels – he wrote one with Mr. Ashbery – rely heavily on dialogue. In the first, “Alfred and Guinevere,” this can have an obfuscating effect, as when a major plot point-“I’m sorry Daddy hit you,” Guinevere says to Alfred – comes up in conversation, never to be explicated in narrative prose.

“What’s For Dinner?” however, masters the art of explication, drawing out latent problems not through spoken confession but in a tireless exercise of Schuyler’s ear, which keeps a dozen highly individuated characters talking, incessantly, through short pages. Much longer than a real play, the book is like a nasal symphony,rehearsing the American accent as it shifts from pre-war, mid-Atlantic politesse to the oafishness of a ’60s teenager. Schuyler gets in his lens a ’70s that looks like the ’50s, where many items from the ’30s remain. One character anticipates the day when his mother’s “Victoriana” will come back into fashion.

Not content with making an odd time capsule, Schuyler discovers several weird sins in his characters, which they cope with admirably and gradually, striking a neat balance between drama and realism. With “The Bell Jar” and “Deliverance,” “What’s for Dinner?” makes a decidedly meek third for novels by major postwar American poets.

blytal@nysun.com