Navigating a Friendship : CHLOE AND OLIVIA <i> By Bell Gale Chevigny (Grove Weidenfeld: $18.95; 355 pp.)</i>

Friendship. It’s hardly a modern invention. For centuries, women have enjoyed the luxury of this special human attachment. While they may have bonded in town squares and drawing rooms, friendships between women were frowned upon in literature. In her 1929 feminist work, “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf pondered the shock waves such a literary friendship might cause: “ ‘Chloe liked Olivia.’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

Bell Gale Chevigny borrows the title of her novel from this literary “what if” posed by Woolf. “Chloe and Olivia” offers an update on friendship, and chronicles 14 years in the lives of two complex women living in difficult times. Just as the hypothetical Chloe and Olivia reflect the mood of their era, the contemporary Chloe and Olivia mirror the tumultuous ‘60s and ‘70s.

Chloe likes Olivia immediately. They meet in Rome in 1961. They’re both graduate students, yet in all other aspects they’re complementary opposites, a contradiction in personalities. Chloe is short, blond and 24 years old. Olivia is tall, dark and 21. Chloe is from a Mom-Dad-and-three-children family in Syracuse, N. Y. Olivia was born in Italy. Her father was an American soldier killed in the war, and her mother was an Italian opera singer who worked with the underground resistance. Chloe is fiercely independent, while Olivia is attached to a handsome artist named Karl. “I’m a better painter than I am a person,” he ominously admits to Chloe.

The bond between the women is instantaneous, and as they talk through the night, the ground rules that will sustain their friendship are established: “Olivia had told so much, and if Chloe didn’t respond in kind, friendship would be impossible. It was like a law: You had to take your turn.”

Following their idyllic months together in Italy, Chloe moves to New York and begins teaching. Olivia’s plans are vague. She impulsively marries Karl while a stunned Chloe watches in “awe.” Karl accepts a teaching assignment in Arizona. Olivia promises to write.

A year-and-a-half passes, and Olivia visits New York with Hannah, her infant daughter. Chloe feels anything but maternal and attempts to match Olivia’s show- and-tell with a pet snake: “She’s exactly 5 foot 4, like me.” Their lives have veered in opposite directions. The mood is understandably tense. This is not to be their last crisis. The conflicts in their friendship are as frequent and as intense as the struggles in their separate lives and in the world around them.

Olivia returns to her new home in Oregon, where Karl has taken a position with a museum art school. Thus begins a cross-country friendship, punctuated with brief visits, sporadic letters and infrequent phone calls. Whether it’s on Chloe’s turf in New York (where she involves Olivia in an anti-war demonstration and a night-on-the-town in Harlem with her social-worker boyfriend, Gabe) or on the West Coast with Olivia, their hours are packed with unrestrained dialogue that quickly cuts to the core of their lives. As Olivia explains to Chloe, “No one knows me better than you. I realize it when I see you. You go so far back and remember so much, it’s sometimes a burden. You know what I hoped for and you’ve seen me fail and fail . . . but you hang in. Even when you’re not there.”

If only distance was their greatest obstacle! It’s a wonder the friendship survives, considering it must constantly compete with such major outside distractions as marriage, infidelity, divorce, graduate school, careers, death of parents, miscarriage, abortion and illness. When the civil-rights struggle, Vietnam and the women’s movement are added to those traumas, there isn’t a whole lot of time for chit-chat. While Chloe wages a personal war on behalf of her political and social causes, Olivia grapples with an unhappy marriage and the difficulty of rearing a daughter alone.

Time and the multitude of events that shape the years serve primarily as a backdrop for the friendship. A professor of literature at the State University of New York at Purchase, Chevigny effectively uses the passage of time like a microscope to re-examine important experiences and conversations. An incident will occur in the present, then immediately the dialogue will flash ahead several years to a discussion in which Chloe and Olivia look back on that same moment. The image thus becomes clearer as the characters move farther away.

“Chloe and Olivia” captures the complex give-and-take that is a friendship. The novel offers a rich glimpse into the reasons why women form these bonds, why some last and others fail, and why the participants work so hard to sustain these vital connections.

When I finished the story of Chloe and Olivia, I was compelled to put aside my chores and nagging deadlines, pour myself a cup of tea, sink into a comfortable chair, pick up the phone and leave a message on the answering machine of my “Chloe,” about 2,596 miles away.