Fuzzy Focus on a Villainous Trio : STRANGE FITS OF PASSION, <i> by Anita Shreve,</i> Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $18.95, 336 pages

“Strange Fits of Passion” is at once a feminist tract about the perils of killing off a husband who beats you silly, and a diatribe about journalists and how they twist the facts.

Whether or not you think this book is successful depends on how much you dislike men who beat their wives, and how much you dislike journalists.

The novel begins with a wealthy 46-year-old female journalist visiting a vulnerable 19-year-old student in her college dorm. (The year is 1990.) Nineteen years before, when this student was a baby, the journalist, a young hotshot, got wind of an interesting killing in Maine. The journalist wrote a story about it, and as a result, the student’s mother did 12 years in the slammer. Now, the journalist appears, to plead her own case.

Back in 1970, young, distraught Mary English appeared in the tiny Maine fishing village of Saint Hilaire. The girl took a new name, Mary Amesbury. She had no money, she had obviously been beaten to an almost insensible pulp, and she carried only her baby, Caroline, in a little basket.

The village, instinctively knowing that she was a victim of wife beating, rallied around. They found her a house and delicately respected her privacy. But because she was a beautiful woman, a couple of men began hanging around. One of them, an oaf named Willis, asked her immediately for sexual favors. When she said “no, thank you,” he contented himself with snagging beers from her refrigerator.

The other man, Jack Strut, a lobster fisherman, had a terrible life himself, saddled with a wife in severe depression. The slow winter days drifted by. Mary got her strength back, and the two fell in love. Everyone in town knew about it, but everyone, out of natural decency, was discreet about this affair between two sad and broken people.

Then--still back in the year 1970--the baby got an ear infection, had an allergy to antibiotics, the New York physician was called, the physician’s nurse informed the wife-beating sociopath, who hired a private detective, who asked the beer-swilling Willis if he had seen a woman and a baby. Willis snitched. The next night, the wife-beater appeared and got shot.

The next thing we know, as readers, is that Mary Amesbury is writing from jail, in perfect prose, to the young hotshot journalist, to tell her story.

The journalist takes all these facts about love and heartbreak and mayhem, and totally sells the young woman out. We are shown the journalistic notes, the written interviews. We know that the wife, victim of dreadful beatings, was a woman of dignity and capable of great love. We know her husband was a maniac. And we’re asked to believe that the journalist sold her out only because of her career.

This is an interesting novel. All the Maine material is wonderful. But we’re asked to believe that a dreadful article which maimed the facts and was badly written has made this journalist a rich woman with lots of gold jewelry.

The wife-beating scenario comes out of a textbook, but that doesn’t make it any less effective. To be wrecked by an insane husband, and to have to keep it a secret, is as frightening now as it was in the ‘70s. And despite the new laws that the author cites, wife-beaters are still terribly poor sports about being killed.

Some mean men have had free reign over their families for generations, and this gives decent men a bad name indeed. It just seems strange that in a book with three villains (a crazed wife-beating sadist, a sexually jealous moron-fink, and an intrepid girl reporter), the last named villain is the worst.

I suppose some wife-beaters will look up indignantly from their breakfasts at these words and hurl poached eggs at their spouses to keep their pitching arms in shape, and blame pushy girl reporters for the state the world is in, but it doesn’t seem fair, and this point of view skews the book irreparably.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn” by Karen McCarthy Brown (University of California Press).