BOOK REVIEW : A Quirky Look at Surrogate Motherhood : THE MOMMY CLUB by Sarah Bird; Doubleday; $18.95, 371 pages

Don’t think for a moment that this particular mommy club refers to a wisecracking group of sidelined professional women temporarily on sandbox duty. The heroine of this quirky, edgy novel has always been a loner--an under-appreciated sculptor who turns found objects into witty ceramic puns; a 38-year-old woman who has managed, one way and another, to avoid the commitment of a regular day job for most of her adult life.

Until the novel begins, Trudy has been living in a cluttered apartment in San Antonio, breathing “the burned plastic stink of Sculpie clay baking into my latest project,” looking down upon Gil’s Used Tires and the Quick-Pik Ice House, precariously supporting herself by selling her miniatures at craft fairs.

Whenever the money runs out, she works as an office temp just long enough to qualify for unemployment benefits. Her lover, Sinclair, an even freer spirit than Trudy herself, has recently left her, the rent is overdue and it’s time for another qualifying stint in the salt mines, but this time Trudy is luckier than usual.

She’s sent to the San Antonio Museum of Folk Art to be interviewed by the docent coordinator, Hillary Goettler, a young woman whose impeccable background, lavish house and stolid lawyer husband represent everything Trudy has voluntarily rejected. Surprisingly, there’s an immediate bond between the two women and, after a few months, Hillary confides to her assistant that she has not been able to become pregnant.

Trudy has no such problem. When the feckless Sinclair abandoned her, she’d had an abortion, vowing to give the child a second chance at her earliest possible opportunity. (Neither logic nor biology is Trudy’s long suit.) She pretends that the child she aborted exists in a kind of anteroom, waiting for a callback.

Asked by Hillary to be a surrogate mother, Trudy agrees and is installed in the luxurious Goettler mansion when the book opens, having already met “nearly all the seven dwarfs of pregnancy . . . Sleepy, Queasy, Spacey, Weepy, Gassy and Moody. The only one who hasn’t checked in is Happy.”

From this point, we shift back and forth rapidly enough to unsettle even a non-pregnant person, laughing most of the way. By juxtaposing Trudy’s impulsive behavior with Hillary’s extreme concern for the social proprieties, the author manages to create a tart and funny novel from materials that easily turn to bathos when treated with the usual seriousness.

Aside from a few sticky conversations with “Sweet Pea,” the child she never had, Trudy generally manages to keep matters moving briskly along.

Although “The Mommy Club” cannot entirely avoid the perils built into the subject of surrogate parenthood, most of the book focuses upon Trudy’s haphazard but satisfactory life before she accepted the colossal responsibility of providing her employer with a baby. A significant interlude is devoted to the passionate attachment between Sinclair and Trudy; careful characterizations revealing considerable insight into apparently irresponsible personalities.

A profane but wise Mexican housekeeper provides additional levity whenever the plot threatens to intrude upon the comedy. Delicious passages sending up the fads and pretensions by which Hillary and Victor Goettler live supply further diversion.

While Trudy is enduring the discomforts of the pregnancy, Hillary is turning herself into an authority on the subject, stuffing the increasingly restless surrogate with semi-edible take-out health food, attempting to control every aspect of Trudy’s life from her clothing to her reading matter.

Hillary has decided that the Goettler baby will be a super-child, regaled with intellectual stimulation while still unborn; provided with every trendy stimulus to prodigyhood thereafter. The combination is meant to counteract any undue genetic influence contributed by Trudy.

Inevitably, the adventure that began all too casually becomes an exploration of the perpetual conflict between conformity and individualism, the tough contemporary tone generally successful at skirting the hazards built into a sensitive topic.

Although the idea of surrogate motherhood as the theme of an essentially comic novel may make some readers uneasy, even they should be appeased and beguiled by the ending of “The Mommy Club.” The disturbing questions are by no means resolved, but that task may lie beyond the province of a social satirist.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Plain Grief” by Maxine Chernoff (Summit).