PUBIS ANGELICAL by Manuel Puig; translated from the Spanish by Elena Brunet (Vintage: $6.95, paperback; 250 pp.)

We make up for our lacks, real or imagined, by gorging ourselves on fantasy--an addiction that takes up further and further from what might truly nourish us. This melancholy condition has provided the plot for novels almost from their beginnings in “Don Quixote”--as if the novel form had to protect itself from becoming yet another fantasy for its unhappy readers, and be instead a warning. I suppose the masterpiece of this theme is “Madame Bovary”--a work close to Manuel Puig’s “Pubis Angelical,” another story of woman’s thwarted romantic quest. But in a psychoanalytic age, we expect--and Puig provides--that the very texture of the fantasies will reveal how we unconsciously collaborate with the world to insure our own defeat.

Ana, the fantasist of “Pubis Angelical,” is a divorced Argentine woman, recuperating from an operation in a Mexican hospital. Perhaps she is about to die. (And so, in her fantasies, generations of women are able to speak with each other beyond the grave.) Ana is visited by comforters: Beatriz, a self-respecting Mexicana feminist, and Pozzi, a left-wing Peronist lawyer and former lover. Pozzi wants Ana to participate in a kidnaping plot against another former lover, and attempts (like the cell mate in “Kiss of the Spider Woman”) to seduce and to bully her into cooperation. For a moment, contemplating Peronism, the reader wonders if this is a fantasy, so tragical, farcical and outlandish is the political history of our time, its paranoid plots, its savagery in the service of phantasms.

Between conversations with her visitors, and entries in her diary, Ana’s story is interrupted--or completed--by fantasies. The first features the most beautiful woman in the world, married (and held captive) by a great industrialist. This woman may, on her 30th birthday, be able to read minds. (Ana is about to turn 30, with the unhappy sense of a life not yet begun.) The language here is overblown, and the story has the gaps and swoops of a movie-infected daydream. It includes a cruel governess, a movie producer, and a handsome, deadly, foreign agent. In the second half of the novel, the fantasy changes to a future age of ice, and now “the most beautiful woman” is a sexual therapist in a totalitarian state. Again, this story features the ability to read minds, and betrayal by a handsome foreign agent.

These fantasies provide our entry to Ana’s inner life, and the way she has conspired in her fate. We learn--from the repeated fantasy motifs that chime with Ana’s history--that Ana despises her gender: “you’re the same as all women, if he touches that soft spot, you are destroyed, that weak, putrid spot which you have between your legs.” She hides her anger at her hateful embodiment behind a hyperbolic acceptance--as the most beautiful woman in the world. And she dreams, in her diary as in her fantasies, of fusion with a lover, her absolute incorporation into the excellence of a “superior” man, who completes her, lifting “her above the dangers destined for mortals.” Words will be unnecessary; the lovers will read each other’s minds. Of course, the fusion is false. The man is a bully, a fraud, a killer. (As, indeed, the men Ana has known have been.) Teased by her fantastical lover with an impossible completion, “the most beautiful woman” herself becomes murderous.

The hatred of her femininity, which Ana masks, is shown--as Pozzi says, speaking the truth as a way of battering Ana into submission to his plot--in Ana’s abandonment of her daughter Clarita, her separation from her mother, her constant denigration of her own sex. This is revealed to Ana, within a fantasy, when a mad woman reveals a vision of a little girl with the pubis of an angel, smooth, without genitals. At the end, Ana is meant to move toward acceptance and health (though we barely see her having the insights that allow for this). She permits a visit from her mother, and asks to see her child. (Or is this a fantasy?) Perhaps the generations of women may speak to each other outside of fantasy.

The novel depends for its interest on our being able to read the sometimes slack fantasies in relation to Ana’s “real” life, a life only very gradually given us. So it isn’t till the last quarter of the book that the fantasies have sufficient, involving interest. Still, there is an audacity to Puig’s method, and an intellectual fire to Puig’s marshaling of motifs and echoes that did then engage me. And he has explored new territories in the novel’s battle against--and exploitation of--our phantasms.