BOOK REVIEW : And If You Could Be God for a Year . . . : ALMIGHTY ME <i> By Robert Bausch</i> ; Houghton Mifflin, $19.95, 263 pages

“God and other artists are always a little obscure.” Thus saith Oscar Wilde. To which Charles Wiggins appendeth a resonant “Amen.”

Wiggins ought to know. He is God.

It is the conceit of author Robert Bausch that Wiggins, a Dodge salesman in Champaign, Ill., is given God’s powers for a year. The Creator’s choice seems arbitrary, if not capricious: Wiggins, if you must know, is kind of a wimp.

Like most of the rest of us, he also is kind of good, kind of funny, kind of selfish. He is, in fact, kind of kind of , wherein lies his personal rub: His wife Dorothy thinks so too, and is planning to leave him and their two daughters. Wants to get a college degree; wants to “get in touch” with herself. (“When you do,” says Charles, “say hello for me.”)

Dorothy is everything to Charles. He doesn’t want to lose her. So when he gets this letter awarding him with God’s puissance “at no obligation or cost to you,” he thinks it might be a neat idea, a way to secure his wife’s allegiance.

Enter Chet, God’s spokesman. Chet is something else. He is about the size and shape of Mickey Rooney, only black. He drives a red Porsche and likes to eat and drink, even though he doesn’t have to. When Charles, empowered, conjures up a steaming cup, Chet demurs: “I hate miracle coffee. Can’t I just have brewed?”

Chet warns Charles to use his new clout wisely, to beware of the law of unintended consequence. Charles doesn’t listen.

Winging it in a men’s room on his first miracle, Charles cures an old man’s arthritis and throws in the cardiovascular system of a 20-year-old. The geezer, feeling a sudden surge of power, thinks he’s having a heart attack.

Next, he visits diarrhea upon an oafish car salesman; then, for a dowdy co-worker, he makes it snow. Later in the night, having forgotten his snow job, he wills the temperature up to 50. Four people die in the ensuing tornadoes.

Albert Schweitzer Charles is not--he doesn’t even think of cancer or starving children until Page 234--but he knows what he wants. He wants Dorothy.

Even the wiles of the Almighty, though, are no match for a determined woman. This, of course, is not exactly news, but the process of discovery--half the book, in fact--provide Wiggins/Bausch a bully pulpit for some of modern literature’s pithier observations on the stranger sex:

* Women “don’t appreciate appreciation.”

* “The difference between marriage before children and marriage after is like the difference between, say, the island of Jamaica and Greenland.”

* --Women need space (“Why don’t you become an astronaut?”)

* --”All mothers clean something when they visit.”

* --A woman’s perfect mate would be . . . “another woman,” preferably just like herself.

* --Anent sex, a man’s feelings are “mostly biological,” a woman’s “mostly spiritual.” Hence, “a male can be ready to make love in 15 seconds or less. He can be done with it in less than a minute. It takes a woman a good half-hour to remember that sex exists. If the atmosphere is not right, or if she’s thinking about something fairly complex and vexing, like the killing of whales or getting the little bones out of canned salmon, you can forget it. She won’t be ready ever.”

Not until 80% of “Almighty Me” has sped through the reader’s fingers does Bausch get down to cases. (Not before we are treated to such verbal aerobics as: A fat man with red hair looks like “a huge cigarette butt”; Charles’ mother-in-law prays, “Hell, Murray, pull the drapes”; a phone rings “incurably”; Charles buys Dorothy a dog called Yee just so he can hear her call it: “Here Yee, here Yee!”)

The meat of the book, the moral--possibly the immoral--is cooked at last when Chet brings Charles to heaven for a guided tour.

It would be unseemly to tip the belated plot. Let’s simply say that unalloyed bliss is not everybody’s dish of tea; that God is not love; that Charles decides to keep the power, but with weighty misgivings.

His final plea, the last sentence in “Almighty Me,” is: “What do you think I should do?”

Ask George Burns.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Strawberry Road” by Yoshimi Ishikawa (Kodansha International)