Time, Space and Heartbeats : ANIMAL DREAMS <i> By Barbara Kingsolver (Harper & Row: $19.95; 228 pp.; 0-06-016350-X) </i>

When Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, “The Bean Trees,” appeared in 1988, it was deeply moving and also highly successful: a book that addressed a difficult subject matter with delicious humor, yet never trivialized the issues. Readers laughed out loud through page after page, then realized they had just acquired a new understanding of childhood sexual abuse and the grass-roots movement providing sanctuary to those who flee the war zones in Central America.

That book gained an immediate audience for this new writer from Kentucky by way of Arizona. Kingsolver didn’t keep her fans waiting long for the next book. She promptly followed “The Bean Trees” with the well-received “Homeland and Other Stories” (Harper & Row) and a piece of nonfiction, “Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983” (ILR, Cornell University Press).

“Animal Dreams,” her second novel, solidly establishes Kingsolver as someone who will give her public more than one great book. It is more ambitious than “The Bean Trees” and the writing achieves a greater intensity, without ever losing the ease and familiarity that made the first novel so appealing. She also has emerged as an important regional writer.

“Animal Dreams” evokes the powerful cultural mix of the American Southwest, where Native American, Anglo and Hispanic people inhabit a dramatic landscape that has taken on mythic connotations. The spiritual (and power-plant-invaded) Four Corners area comes to mind.

Kingsolver sets the stage when she warns: “Grace, Arizona, and its railroad depot are imaginary, as is Santa Rosalia Pueblo, although it resembles the Keresan pueblos of northern New Mexico. Other places, and crises, in the book are actual.”

“Animal Dreams” is a story of two sisters, Cosima (Codi) and Halimeda (Hallie), and their father, a small-town doctor. Kingsolver uses two first-person narratives. The main voice we follow is that of Cosima. Her storytelling is interspersed with brief, disturbing commentary by Doc Homer, who develops Alzheimers as the book unfolds. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the novel is the way Kingsolver allows us into the labyrinthine fog of Doc Homer’s stumbling, shifting mind. The deepest counterpoint is that which builds between Cosima’s frank narrative and Doc Homer’s darker mind travels.

Codi, the book’s protagonist, is a medical student in her 30s who has worked at a 7-Eleven as well as the usual internships common to her future profession. In this book, she travels from medical school and an uncomfortable relationship with a fellow doctor back home to the remote western town of her childhood. Hallie, who feels vibrantly present despite the fact that she is always offstage, has gone to offer her agricultural engineering skills to the struggling revolution in Nicaragua.

There also is Cosima’s ex-lover, Carlo, left behind in an acceptable but meaningless future in the city, and there is Loyd, part Apache, Navajo and Pueblo, who spells his name “wrong” but understands both living and Cosima in ways that help her change how she will walk in the world.

There are the other women of this story: young Emelina, whose husband is mostly off somewhere working the trains; the elders of the Stitch and Bitch Club, Uda Ruth Dell and Dona Althea.

A common story--going home again. A warm and energizing story. But “Animal Dreams” is much more. It is a story of female vision and courage, of what can happen when a daughter loses her mother and believes she remembers her death. It is a tale of racial and cultural differences as well as commonality, of death and life and what they mean to one another. It is also a book about time and its overlaps, about memory’s use of time and our human use of memory. It is a story about the pain of love:

“His two girls are curled together like animals whose habit is to sleep underground, in the smallest space possible. Cosima knows she’s the older, even when she’s unconscious: One of her arms lies over Halimeda’s shoulder as if she intends to protect them both from their bad dreams. Dr. Homer Noline holds his breath, trying to see movement there in the darkness, the way he’s watched pregnant women close their eyes and listen inside themselves trying to feel life.

“He feels a constriction in his heart that isn’t disease but pure simple pain, and he knows he would weep if he could. Not for the river he can’t cross to reach his children, not for distance, but the opposite. For how close together these two are, and how much they have to lose. How much they’ve already lost in their lives to come.”

Everyone fully inhabits his or her character: “Loyd and I shared one chair; apparently we were the official lovebirds of this fiesta. He spent a lot of time telling me what I was eating. There were, just to begin with, five different kinds of posole , a hominy soup, with duck or pork and chilis and coriander. Of the twenty or so different dishes I recognized only lime Jell-o, cut into cubes. I gave up trying to classify things by species and just ate. To everyone’s polite amusement, my favorite was the bread, which was cooked in enormous, nearly spherical loaves, two dozen at a time, in the adobe ovens outside. It had a hard brown crust and a heavenly, steaming interior, and tasted like love. I ate half a loaf by myself, believing no one would notice. Later, in bed, Loyd told me they were all calling me the Bread Girl.”

And the landscape itself comes alive: “Eventually we stopped in a protected alcove of rock, where no snow had fallen. The walls sloped inward over our heads, and long dark marks like rust stains ran parallel down the cliff face at crazy angles. When I looked straight up I lost my sense of gravity. The ground under my boots was dry red sand, soft and fine, weathered down from the stone. . . .”

Kingsolver brings to our literary panorama a social consciousness that is bedrock to her rich prose style. In this respect, her work reminds us of some of the important Latin American writers, novelists like Mexico’s Juan Rulfo, Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Chilean Isabel Allende. Yet her concerns are rooted in 20th-Century North America: the problems of rampant, ecological destruction, sexual and other abuse issues, our responsibility toward the victims of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, and the grass-roots response to the terror rising about us as society comes apart at the seams. These concerns, evident in her first novel and further developed as well in her second, make Kingsolver a writer who is as profoundly regional as uniquely global.

As I read the last few pages of “Animal Dreams,” I felt a brief moment of panic. Would this book really end as it seemed it was going to? Suddenly the outcome I had hoped for unwound before my grateful eyes. Things happened as I wanted them to, as I breathed a sigh of relief. This neat wrap-up may be the single flaw in an otherwise exceptionally crafted narrative.

Most important for me, however, is my conviction that Kingsolver is giving a new voice to our literature, one that fulfills its promise even as it begins its journey: four books in as many years.

“Animal Dreams” is one of those rare novels I could not put down. It demanded a single span of my attention, and left me wondering whether to go back to the beginning or simply anticipate the next product from this woman’s pen.