25 Years of Love in the Time of Cold War : THE EXILED HEART: A Meditative Autobiography, <i> by Kelly Cherry,</i> Louisiana State University Press, $24.95, 268 pages

You don’t read a book like this every day, and frankly, I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. (If there is an afterlife, with a Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, government officials of all countries should be handed this volume and made to write term papers on it for the next 500 millennia.)

For those who don’t know her previous good work, Kelly Cherry is a marvelously perky and insouciant novelist and poet. She has always seemed like a bit of a dude--she loves funny jokes, her publicity pictures always show her in cowboy hats. Not in any sense to take away from the seriousness of her endeavor, she has always seemed carefree. Far from it.

Twenty-five years ago, on a trip behind the Iron Curtain, in the lobby of the Metropole Hotel in Moscow, Kelly Cherry met Imant Calnin, a successful Latvian composer. They spent about eight hours together during the following four days, and from then on, took the position that they were madly in love.

Although Imant had already been married a couple of times, and Kelly Cherry once, they would hold to their vision of Romantic Love for close to 25 years. Spending time, wasting time, redeeming time, who knows?

Kelly Cherry likes to joke about her education. She says she went to a “bad” high school in the South somewhere, and uses this ironically, as a kind of abstract backboard to bounce her ideas against.

And yet, at some point, a part of the reader detaches, and begins to wonder: What kind of school did Kelly Cherry go to? What kind of television set did they have in her house? What kind of newspaper was delivered to her door?

How could it have escaped her altogether that from 1945 until about two minutes ago, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a great big argument, in which one of the favorite threats on both sides was to solemnly promise that they were going to blow up the whole civilized world--at least in the northern latitudes?

How could it have escaped Kelly Cherry that governments, almost by definition, are not interested in the welfare of individuals in the countries they govern?

How could it have escaped her that the exercise of power is best shown in the infliction of inconvenience, misery, frustration and general mix-ups? Maybe it was that high school she went to.

Anyway, through the next 25 years, Kelly Cherry discovers-- as if it had never been discovered before-- that the KGB listens in to phone calls. That the Soviet post office seldom delivers mail without opening it first. That the FBI and the CIA may even share some of these displeasing characteristics. That the fact that she and her Latvian composer wanted to live together in a Latvian farmhouse, and collaborate on an opera didn’t cut any ice with anybody.

Imant’s father gives him this callous advice: “Marry someone from your own country.” Imant’s dad is working from a different set of plans, of course.

He’s taking the position that the Soviet Union has conquered Latvia. That Imant has been married a couple of times before; that he has a decent career as a composer. That there’s nothing a thug-government likes more than a cultural dissident to play around with.

All this seems purely to escape Kelly Cherry, who holds on to dream-house dreams: a pretty little farm in the Latvian countryside. Who insists that she has to marry Imant no matter what, and peppers every citizen, politician, embassy, whatever with irate letters: and (the author is going to hate me for this) beyond the concept of lifelong romantic love, a kind of petulant American consumer-privilege begins to creep in: I want my Latvian composer, and I want him now. And don’t forget to throw in that farmhouse, vine-covered.

Did this 25-year love-campaign hinder the Cold War, or abet it? Or, more sadly, did it do absolutely nothing at all?

Three separate times, Cherry mentions her supply of “rum plum eye shadow.” That cosmetic is one of her talismans, a reminder of her own individual importance. But how important is any individual against any government? That’s an answer none of us I suspect want to look at too closely. Twenty-five years were lost in this quixotic errant. Somewhere, on each side of the globe, gray-faced bureaucrats are smiling.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Gerard Manley Hopkins” by Robert Bernard Martin (Putnam’s)