BOOK REVIEW : Paradise Blurred by Communication Loss : THE GATES OF PARADISE, <i> by Gwyneth Cravens</i> . Ticknor & Fields. $18.95, 200 pages

Sometimes a reviewer reads a book and doesn’t get it. The reason for that can go two ways: Either the writer is at fault or the reader is. Many times a reviewer will dither on in the perfect assumption that he or she is right, and that the writer has been remiss in this way or that way. The writer has no recourse, except to plan an elaborate and usually futile revenge. It’s important to say here that--whether or not this particular reviewer “liked” this particular book--an ambitious project has been undertaken and finished.

Melpomene Gilman (named, the reader will notice, for one of the Muses), has married her third husband, James, and come to live with him in his beautiful but crumbling ancestral home by the side of a lovely bay. Everything is lovely here--the flowers, the trees, the ever-changing surface of the water. And Melpomene has found a calling of sorts: She has become the minister to an already organized--but unnamed and undefined--Christian fellowship that has been meeting in a disorganized fashion until Melpomene came up here to take it over.

James once had a promising career, but either he or it lost interest, went off somewhere. Now he ponders writing a book on a painter with only 12 or so paintings to his credit.

Every day, James gets up and decides that this is the day he will begin his new work. But something, perhaps from his past, militates against this. (I had trouble with this. Does James poke moonily about the beach he grew up on, unable to do one darn thing, because he’s a spineless moron, or because he feels badly about having left his last wife for Melpomene, or because he knows the project is useless to begin with?) James thinks constantly, about his painter, about a girl he used to go out with and about how lonesome he is.

But back in the house, Melpomene wails ! Parishioners line up to get their dose of platitudinous advice, which Melpomene delivers absent-mindedly today. Her old boyfriend, Kuno, is returning from Europe. Melpomene is on an all-day fast to be thin for Kuno, but this practice makes her crabby. She keeps putting her mouth in a kissing position, rehearsing for when her ex-lover returns.

Melpomene is a very old-fashioned anti-heroine, the kind of fictional woman Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and, especially, Dorothy Parker used to deal in. Melpomene is vain beyond words. She’s narcissistic to the max. Her clothes, her makeup, her lips, are all, all. (But is this the terrible sin that the author makes it out to be?)

Melpomene strives for “perfection” in the act of living. Again, her literary grandmother is Mansfield’s self-deceived wife in “Bliss,” or Woolf’s crazed and suicidal Mrs. Dalloway, or the poor Dorothy Parker heroine alone in a living room with a vase of wilting flowers and an indifferent husband, who queries her spouse thus: “How do you like my daffy-down-dillies?”

The author detests her heroine. She’s not too crazy about her hero either, but she detests her heroine. What is the author so incredibly angry about? Yes, a lady comes in, asks her pastor for advice, is not listened to closely enough by Melpomene, and goes off to kill herself.

But in what we might laughingly refer to as the real world, people in the “helping professions” make those mistakes all the time. Are we to be angry with this lady minister because she loves the way she looks? Because she says mean things to her husband? Because she harbors adulterous thoughts? Because she tries for perfection and has to settle for imperfection in a big way? (In the words of the old joke: “Doesn’t everybody?”)

Melpomene pretends she lives in Paradise but instead it’s her own hell. This looks a lot like what we call the human condition. The author’s own rage, contempt and distaste are separate entities here. To this reader, they blur the picture and the message, so that it’s quite impossible to know where the lines of communication snap or who’s at fault here when the novel doesn’t come through--the author, or the reviewer.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery” by Frank Spencer (Oxford University Press).