BOOK REVIEW : Mysterious, Murky Novel About Everywoman : LITTLE WOMAN <i> by Ellen Akins</i> Harper & Row $18.95, 240 pages

The title of Ellen Akins’ new novel refers to its protagonist and narrator. She is six-foot-two or -three and weighs 185 pounds. Her name is Beauty, and though everyone thought she was pretty when she was a child, nobody thinks so now; she, least of all.

Oxymorons are nouns in a rage at not being able to do more. When you speak of cold fire, it is because there is no other way to express its searing power. To suggest the pain and anger of a woman’s sense of misplacement and misuse, Akins has come up with an oxymoronic heroine.

Beauty is a giant; it is her nature as well as her physique. But the world wants her small. Her father doted on her for a while, she tells us, “until I grew progressively bigger, forcing him finally to say ‘Whoa’ or words to that effect, I expect, since that was his philosophy vis-a-vis me from then on.”

She tried to comply; as an adolescent, she stooped. “In this contorted posture, hunched and still hovering over my supposed peers, I longed so intensely to be one of them that my longing alone would have put them at an impossible remove if my height hadn’t.”

She tried for an acceptable line of work: advertising. But her nature--woman’s nature, Akins suggests, is giant’s nature--got in the way. She proposed a perfume that would only be noticeable to the wearer; authenticity, that is, instead of propaganda. In a valiant effort to recoup, she married her boss-mentor; but she is utterly unable to describe him. And she tried so hard to be a mother that she bore twins.

Mothers are supposed to hug and fondle a lot. So the world--in this case, her mother-in-law--insisted. But at her size, she knew, this could be fatal. When the mother-in-law plops one twin on her lap, she pulls away, dropping and nearly killing him. She packs a bag and walks out.

It is at this point, 15 pages along, that “Little Woman” essentially begins. And it is at this point that its joyous anger and witty irrepressibility flicker and submerge in a cloudiness that hides from sight most of what the author is telling us.

Beauty meets Clara, her tiny opposite number. Clara is a five-time widow and is, or seems to be, immensely rich. She takes mysteriously to Beauty, and offers unstinting support and company in a scheme to create a female Utopia.

Together, they buy up a square mile of wilderness in northernWisconsin, where Beauty used to go when she was still small and identified the whole world with her mother. They round up a dozen women in various stages of abuse; they will set up a self-sufficient community, starting from scratch and making everything themselves. Beauty supervises the awkward building of a windmill. Two cows are acquired, and some chickens.

From here on, it is an inch-by-inch account of cold, dirt, hunger, misery and anger. The women not only are abused, they are--no doubt this is the point--deformed in various ways. They are lazy, quarrelsome, incompetent, childish, deranged and violent.

There is a mysterious and alluring doctor in the vicinity, who lends a hand when things get out of hand. He becomes lover to several of the women, including Clara and, eventually, Beauty. There is a neighboring houseful of apparently orphaned children. There is mud and mayhem.

The dream of self-sufficiency founders among the large checks that Clara and Beauty are forced to write, and in the successive desertions of each one of the Women Abreast--the name they have given to the community. Beauty is left alone with the doctor and with the baby born to Clara, who has been killed by the homemade windmill.

The central theme is compelling. Beauty, the giant in Akins’ vision of Everywoman, is fighting a brutal and titanic struggle not simply with society but also with the primordial nature of things. Whether she wins or loses, and what she wins or loses, is not clear; but this is not necessarily important for the reader.

What is important are the obscure terms on which it is all told. Who Clara is, or the doctor, or the houseful of orphans, quite escapes me. More seriously, for all the grim and detailed realism of life and misfortune at Women Abreast, it can be hard to be sure just what is happening even on the most concrete and minute-by-minute level.

Akins, author of “Home Movies,” is a powerful and original writer. In “Little Woman,” the power goes haywire. Its mystery, so heavily applied, turns to murk. Instead of kindling the imagination, it douses it.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Hairdo” by Sarah Gilbert.