BOOK REVIEW : Difficult Women Live by Nurturing Their Own Worlds : CRAZY LADIES<i> by Michael Lee West</i> Long Street Press, Marietta, Ga.$18.95. 352 pages.

Statistics show that when a man’s wife dies, quite soon he often dies too. But when a woman’s husband dies, she re-upholsters the couch, throws out his golf clubs and goes on a cruise.

Does this mean women are more hard-hearted? Maybe. Or maybe it means that women, besides being “nurturing,” carry on a lifestyle that is, in itself, nurturing.

Irving Wallace, of all people, noticed it long ago in his first novel, “The Sins of Philip Flemming.” When Philip Flemming leaves his wife, she moves through the house, doing the laundry and making the beds. Philip may have left, but she still has the house, and by extension, her own life.

In “Crazy Ladies,” Miss Gussie, only 18, a bride with a brand new baby, struggles with poverty, worry, the Great Depression. The year is 1932. The place, a Southern town called Crystal Falls. Miss Gussie knows the ground she lives on utterly; her people have owned this land since the beginning of recorded time.

On Page 3 or 4, a mad rapist-killer comes into her kitchen, but nobody messes with Miss Gussie’s kitchen. She thrusts a knife into the killer’s guts. Charlie, Gussie’s husband, is shocked and apprehensive. The would-be rapist is the son of the local bank president, and Charlie works there as a lowly teller.

Miss Gussie isn’t impressed. The man was a nut case, he came into her kitchen and spilled blood all over her floor. Not only that, he could have killed her (colicky) child. When the sun goes down, she buries the killer alive in her flower garden and goes on planting corn and snap beans and tomatoes and squash and marigolds and zinnias.

And even though her first daughter, Dorothy, is a handful and a half, Miss Gussie goes on and has a second child, Clancy Jane. Poor old Charlie, strung out from the rigors of World War II, as well as the earlier domestic catastrophe, keels over and dies.

Nobody misses him much. A black girl named Queenie comes to work for Miss Gussie. Dorothy is fast growing up into one of those legendary awful women who demands and pouts and whines and gets the blues and is convinced nobody loves her. (She’s correct. Nobody does love her, because she’s such a pill.)

Clancy Jane, on the other hand, has another kind of wild streak: When she’s only 15, she runs off with a boy who works the oil rigs off the coast of New Orleans. Clancy Jane drinks too much. She goes through dark nights of despair, attempts suicide. Her neglected daughter, Violet, lives the first 12 years of her life on stale miniature marshmallows.

Dorothy has stayed home and married the owner of the local dime store. She’s so sure her mother doesn’t love her that naturally she moves in next door. She has two kids, Mack, a boy, whom she loves, and Bitsy, a girl, whom she detests. (About her husband, Albert, Dorothy hardly thinks at all.)

Meanwhile, Miss Gussie and Queenie keep on making tomato juice from scratch.

When Clancy Jane’s husband dies, she returns home, with her slightly wilted Violet. At first, Violet and Bitsy hate each other, but the eternally fascinating machinations of family life lead them to form a cautious alliance. At first it looked as though Clancy Jane, with her drugs, her drinking and her suicide attempts, was the crazy one, but it turns out of course that Dorothy is really crazy--except that she’s not.

As I write, I can think of two women I know who are “difficult,” “impossible,” never happy unless they’re sowing unhappiness. It may be a female trait, just as shooting off 16-inch guns and making left turns in dangerous traffic may sometimes be thought of as “male traits.”

What’s the dynamic of this kind of woman? Author Michael Lee West, a young, Southern registered nurse (who wrote this novel, she says, the way she might “piece a quilt”) makes a brave stab at entering into poor, awful Dorothy’s mind. And West evokes Clancy Jane’s more sympathetic “craziness” as well.

The centripetal force of Miss Gussie, her house, her house chores, and the question “Who’s going to get the love, if there’s any going around?” keeps these characters together and interested in what’s going to happen next.

Women! If you yawned (secretly) through William Faulkner, you might want to take a look at this book, for a splendid new take on the South.

Next: John Wilkes reviews “ Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future “ by Dougal Dixon (St. Martin’s Press).