BOOK REVIEW : High-Level Intrigue but a Desultory Plot : TRAFFIC AND LAUGHTER <i> by Ted Mooney</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95, 390 pages

The gestures, words and silences of Ted Mooney’s novel reek of meaningfulness the way the pages of “Vanity Fair” reek of perfume.

Sylvia, a Los Angeles pop deejay, brushes her hair “with the patient, gliding stroke of a woman for whom the world is constantly re-explaining itself.” Sitting on a couch, her handbag beside her, “her bare feet, brown and quiescent by the bag, reminded her that today was already, as always, another day.”

She finds sand on the bedroom floor at Zack’s, to whom she used to married; and reflects “what it meant to have an ex-husband whose guests took off their bathing suits in front of the mirror.” And when her father, a top U.S. disarmament negotiator, is on the phone to the President, “they exchange pleasantries of the sort favored by American men who have recently been made aware of their own mortality.”

That’s awfully responsible work for a hairbrush, a pair of feet, a spill of sand, and a moment of polite chitchat. “Traffic and Laughter,” a melange of high-level international intrigue and the low-level but glossy intrigues of those involved in it, delivers parcel after expensively-wrapped parcel marked: “Significance. Fragile.” There is a large hole in each one; the contents have dribbled out.

It is not just Sylvia and Walter, her father, who are top figures; so is almost everyone else. Nomanzi, Sylvia’s roommate, is visiting from South Africa where she is a top black entertainer, as well as a secret freedom fighter. Joseph, Nomanzi’s father, is a top international negotiator for the freedom movement, and a suave and sophisticated intimate of Walter’s. Sylvia’s lover, Michael, is a top Hollywood special-effects designer. Laurel, his fiancee, is a top Hollywood florist. And when Michael’s windshield is spattered from on high, the culprit is no mere pigeon but a truly top bird: a golden eagle with top (and signifying) pinpoint capabilities.

Michael’s and Sylvia’s sex life is top stuff, as well; described in lush and heated detail that is curiously antiseptic at the same time. It is a kind of evangelical cheerleading. The book stops every so often for a few pages of intercourse; as some 19th-Century novel might stop for a few pages of uplift.

Appropriately to the theme of high level plot and pursuit, sex tends to be conducted in stressful circumstances. The couple make love in her L.A.-area hilltop house just as it is about to be incinerated in a brush fire; a helicopter rescues them immediately afterward. They make love--under the tablecloth and with the help of another bared foot--in a posh restaurant. They make love in the lavatory on a transatlantic flight. They even do it in bed, when they can make it that far.

Except for obvious attributes, it is hard to tell Sylvia and Michael apart. For that matter, it is hard to tell them from Laurel, Nomanzi, Joseph, Walter, Walter’s German diplomatic counterpart, Bloch, or even from William, a shadowy intelligence operative who claims to be a ghost, and probably is. He keeps ordering and drinking orange juice, but the glasses remain full.

They are decor, all of them; through which a plot cloudily develops. It develops in the 1990s, but it is not quite our 1990s. The atomic bomb has only just been invented. This means it was not used in World War II, and that it was necessary to invade Japan. It also means that the entire history of the postwar world must have been different.

One of the book’s cloudinesses, in fact, is how desultory the differences are. “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Doctor Strangelove” are mentioned as imaginary titles of movies that William claims fraudulently to have made. The Paris airport is named Henri Petain instead of Charles de Gaulle. (But why? The atom bomb had nothing to do with the defeat of Germany and Vichy.) It is a dumb cosmetic touch. It is put in to allow Walter, Bloch and Joseph--no other negotiator is mentioned; again, why?--to agree that the new bomb will not be tested. Instead, it will be secretly installed in the Kalahari Desert and used to pressure South Africa into allowing free multiracial elections.

Walter is supported by the American President, but the Defense Department wants it tested. Its operatives make an attempt on the President’s life, seem to threaten Walter, and somehow--through William--plot against Sylvia, Michael, Nomanzi and others.

To call this far-fetched is the least of it. At one point, a South African rock concert turns into a bloody riot--Michael, Sylvia and Nomanzi are there--when a policeman stumbles, and his shotgun goes off and downs a police helicopter. At the end, a South African sentry sets off the Kalahari nuclear device with a rifle-shot aimed at a bird. (Those signifying birds again--we also have a few lines about a cuckoo trying to decide whether it’s time to head south.)

The incoherent plot, the mannered, perfume-ad characters, and their pretentious dialogue combine to suggest a world of paranoid malaise. It is the kind that often surfaced in high-budget Hollywood films of the ‘70s, with lots of swimming pools and really good things, elegantly Mephistophelean CIA men, and onion layer after onion layer of cosmic betrayal. “Traffic” brings us another dose of such expensive malaise, but it does it on the cheap.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Kate Chopin” by Emily Toth (William Morrow) and “A Vocation and a Voice” by Kate Chopin (Penguin).