REALITY AND DREAMS.<i> By Muriel Spark</i> .<i> Houghton Mifflin: 160 pp., $22</i>

In “Reality and Dreams,” Dame Muriel Spark surgically dismembers the movie business personality with the kind of lacerating insight that tends to delight those outside the business but tends to numb the movie business practitioner with familiarity.

“Don’t your friends ring you up?” asks a friend of Tom, the novel’s temporarily maimed director-protagonist. “Yes, they do. . . ,” he answers. “Quite often. I don’t always want to reply. They want to know if I’ll be ready to give a lecture on filmmaking at some university in six months’ time, they want to know if they have my permission to change some paragraphs in my film script, they want to know if they can come and see me. What do I say?--I could say, ‘I’ve got a backache. Disintegrate. Drop dead. Do what you damn well like.’ ”

Now, a normal person might find this reaction excessive, broad, unsympathetic. What Sparks has captured so succinctly, however, is its ordinariness, its banality. Sparks knows that Tom’s profound crankiness is the whiplash of success. We see in her protagonist this malaise in all its ugliness: the loathing of others, particularly those who need something from you, get in your way or are otherwise aesthetically insulting. The story of “Reality and Dreams” extends this crankiness to irksome family members, the constraints of monogamy and the vicissitudes of the business (London style: It’s remarkably similar to Hollywood).

Tom’s fall from a crane while making his last movie and his subsequent incapacitation lead to a family crisis: the disappearance of his daughter, Marigold. She is the lesser of Tom’s two daughters, the preferred daughter being of course the more beautiful progeny of his first marriage. Marigold is a literal-minded clod who hasn’t the wit to appreciate her parents’ sophistication, their taking on of lovers and their total disinterest in the lovers of the other. Marigold is, in fact, appalled by her parents, Tom and Claire, who are likewise appalled by her. This state of mutual disregard is interrupted when Marigold vanishes. Was she kidnapped? Murdered? Is she chasing a chimera from one of her father’s movies to punish him? Is she alive and taunting him? Is she trying to disgrace him?

The marriage is rocked (an English, publicity-driven sort of rocked) by the crisis and Tom’s movie falls apart and comes together--many times, which is par for the course. Tom and Claire finally figure out where their daughter might be--at a beach where her father became obsessed with a simple French girl making hamburgers, whose image became the inspiration for his last fateful movie called (though its name is changed by faceless producers throughout the tale) “The Hamburger Girl.” Sparks finds at this moment a perfect coalescence of plot, character and theme: The self-enthralled parents never even see the daughter they are looking for, when they finally find her. She sees them, we see, perfectly. She lured them there with their own narcissism and they never connect. It is masterful.

But the real text of the piece is the family’s unintentionally existential ruminations, as the parents try to figure out who their daughter is and, by extension, where she might be, and their daughter schemes to illuminate them. Marigold tells a confidant: “There comes a time when one has to see things sub specie aeternitatis. Which means . . . under the light of eternity. That is what my parents now have to do. Examine their utility, their service, ability, their accountability, their duties and commitments. . . .” Scary daughter. But she came by her desire for retribution honestly.

This is Tom’s reaction to his daughter’s plight: “He was thinking how afraid everyone was since Marigold’s disappearance, to get mixed up with him . . . Tennessee Williams, he thought, would have called me from the States. . . . He would have been a true friend.” Is it only in the movie business that people have friends in the subjunctive tense, theoretical friends who package well at crisis moments?

The gigantic yawning abyss of self-absorption, which is part of the movie business personality, as identified by Sparks, has deeper, quasi-metaphysical aspects. When Tom meets a cop investigating Marigold’s disappearance, he thinks the cop is oddly cast, and then rethinks--it’s casting against type and so it works! The assumption that things are not what they appear, that what does appear must be gussied-up, prettified or distressed and grunged, that the film moment constantly requires sound, effect, light: This is filmmaking. The filmmaker’s need to get closer and closer to the action is a desperate quest for authenticity, a creative engagement with the thing itself. The paradox is that the search for something real is thought to occur by getting closer and closer to its being photographed and transformed into another, slicker more beautiful thing.

Spark writes, “Tom often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams”: English rationalist and Cartesian philosopher Bishop Berkeley meet the modern film director. When Tom magnifies his glimpse of a girl cooking hamburgers into myth, he denudes her of any subjectivity and he is punished, Greek style, by his fall from director grace. God is by the mighty crane.

The choice Sparks makes for the accident to have befallen her director is dead-on perfect. Directors love cranes. They give them omniscience, and directors crave omniscience. A movie set is the last bastion of totalitarian decision-making in the arts, and anyone who has ever tangled with a director while shooting--a bear in a trap of his own creation--will feel a certain guilty glee of recognition at the aptness of the comeuppance. “There was no need, no need at all for you to get up on that crane,” his lawyer tells him. “An ordinary dolly is perfectly all right for directing a motion picture these days. But no, you have to be different, you have to be right up there beside the photographer, squeezed in and without a seat-belt. You have to be God.” “Are you suggesting God wears a seat-belt?” he answers.

Later he admits. “Yes, I did feel like God up on that crane. It was wonderful to shout orders through the amplifier and, like God, watch the team down there group and regroup as bidden. Especially those two top stars and the upstart minor stars, with far too much money, thinking they could direct the film better themselves. There was none of the ‘Just a minute, may I suggest. . . .’ What do they think a film set is? A democracy, or something?”

Sparks incapacitates Tom to show him what God is really up to. Once benched, with no work to protect him, no heights from which to fall, Tom feels, uncomfortably, what it feels like to be human, at least until he can go back to the set.

“As soon as I hear a bit of news these days, someone comes along to contradict it. My film was canceled, now it’s going ahead. My son-in-law was looking for a job but now he’s left my daughter. . . . First, I had to go back in the hospital and now I don’t.”

“That’s life,” says [his friend] Julia.

“No, it’s not ordinary life. But let me tell you that for people in the film business, yes, it is life. Nothing with us is consistent.”

Befuddled still, Tom separates himself from mere mortals, whose lives, he supposes, make sense, in an ordinary sort of way. But consistency, Tom will apparently never learn, eludes even “normal people.”