BOOK REVIEW : A ‘Preposterous Plot’ Provides a Unique Look at a Mad, Mad World : WAITING FOR RAIN<i> by Indiana Nelson</i> Random House $18.95, 370 pages

You have to approach “Waiting for Rain” with a few caveats: On its (pretty) face, it’s preposterous. The plot is plain preposterous! And although there are fistfuls of characters--all of them intriguing--some of them, some of the time, tend to speak in the same voice, especially when they get to talking about lofty subjects--such as the meaning of life. Finally, some of these characters tend to change in mid-stream: A girl portrayed at the beginning of this narrative as a victim turns out later to be a first-class villain. A money-grubbing harridan in fictional present-time performs, in flashback, an act that surely qualifies her for heroine status. So the novel isn’t perfect.

But what a kick it is! Here’s a little patch of the plot: Back in 1955, an Arizona rancher named Horace McAllister attends a fur coat fashion show in Manhattan. He lays eyes on a nameless model in her mid-teens who wears, under her coat, pinned to her basic black cocktail dress, “a pave diamond peacock with a luxurious fanning tail of emeralds, sapphires and diamonds.”

A half-hour or so later, Horace, out of his mind with lust, rapes this girl. An hour or so after that, he kills himself out of remorse. He leaves behind a 14-year-old daughter named Jewell, out in Dragoon, Ariz., whose mother immediately deserts her, and who will be sent to New York to live with her crass and unattractive aunt, Nanine, who is married to the wealthy and quietly desperate Dinwiddie Brown, who, since he is related by marriage to those Arizona McAllisters, goes to see Magda, that model of furs, gets her out of jail, pays for the missing peacock (on loan from Cartier), and falls madly in love with this mystery woman--even though she’s 17, and he’s 59. Meanwhile, in the Manhattan mansion, Jewell, 14, has met her cousin Johnnie, 9, and they immediately become soul mates, destined to be together forever.

The themes here are: Eastern vs. Western wealth; the relative importance of being rich, being loved, or being “visible” in this context; knowing what your true identity in the world is. But all this takes a back seat to the author’s own voice--intrusive, whacked out, opinionated, musical, infuriating.

For instance, Dinwiddie, peering at Nanine, his crabby wife, sees “a plethora of disgusting jars and bottles, creams and sinister unguents on his wife’s dressing table--some with the caps left off, he had to look away; and oozing out from the closet and across the floor, a spill of lingerie, discarded shoes, a girdle dragged off, the stockings still attached, and other nasty souvenirs no decent man should ever have to confront.”

Much, much later, when Jewell is 39 and Johnnie is 34 and Magda is in another, far more mysterious context, the whole cast of characters repairs to Venice, Italy, for 100 or so pages, and the author again goes hog wild.

Jewell checks out the view: “The enchanted abyss between sea and sky--the Basin of San Marco, where for those who want there might be a soft dancing in the basin, a rosy simulacrum of wavering towers, of drowsy lions and amethyst lamps, a listless swaying in the morbid heat of boats and palaces.

And then, sliding out silently from behind the Salute and the golden Dogana, there comes a vast ship emerging from Giudecca like some horrendous mirage, a sluggish beast dragging herself into the basin to be swallowed down by the lagoon beyond.”

Although the thrust of the novel is mystical, the beauty of it obviously lies in its mad descriptions of the physical world: Children drowsy with lust just on the threshold of having sex, green Eastern lawns sloping down to the choppy Atlantic, marshlands on unknown islands out in the Adriatic, cowboys riding the ranch in hot Tucson mornings.

The characters fall in and out of love and in again; that diamond peacock changes owners faster than a volleyball in the summertime on our own Manhattan Beach. But the great stuff here is the author’s voice.

Although Indiana Nelson allegedly spurns the world (the epigraph here is from the Bhagavad Gita), it’s clear she loves the artifacts of our physical existence.

She’s a mad goddess of the concrete manifestation. The book is unique--and that’s a compliment.

Next: Lee Dembart reviews “The Almanac of Science and Technology: What’s New and What’s Known,” edited by Richard Golob and Eric Brus.