BOOK REVIEW : This Magic Realism Is Just a Bag of Tricks : BIRDSONG ASCENDING<i> by Sam Harrison</i> Harcourt Brace Jovanovich $22.95, 315 pages

Doris, the malevolent soul who gets inside the minds of the other characters in “Birdsong Ascending” and manipulates and destroys them, has an idle moment one day. She might stop by the library to get a book, she thinks. “Maybe something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

Oh-oh.

Why does magic realism import so poorly, as if it were Camembert and had to be pasteurized first? Put aside Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” which tells of the different country that lives inside this one: the Third World heritage of black slavery. Put aside Lawrence Thornton’s “Imagining Argentina,” which goes to Latin America for its setting. Put aside parts of Sam Harrison’s previous novel, “Walls of Blue Coquina,” which ignites the life of a dreamy community on a forgotten bit of the Gulf Coast.

The magic in magic realism doesn’t come from the magician. It comes from the reality. It is a reality so strange, so charged and working by such different associations that to write about it in one of our varieties of linear realism would be to distort it. The result may seem magical to us, but--switching ethnocentric places--so has an airplane seemed in certain other parts of the world.

Unless it draws on reality--even the reality of a dream, if the dreamer is strong enough--magic realism is a bag of tricks, a performance. Harrison’s new novel, unfortunately, is pretty much all performance; magician’s passes that take place in a vacuum, try to create a reality and fail.

There is Doris’ grandmother, half-Haitian and half-white, a fanatical fundamentalist church-goer with an aura of voodoo and possessor of one blue and one brown eye. She kills herself; soon, a monstrous fish is caught with a doll in its stomach. The doll has similarly unmatched eyes. Doris, who hated her grandmother, is forced by her mother to keep it in her room.

There is a lecherous preacher who molests Doris. There is a backwoodsman with a mystical belief in roundness--he steals ball-bearings and leaves his house because it is square. There is Angel, an itinerant guru, who chews glass and is followed everywhere by a swarm of butterflies. Doris’ daughter, Kitty, falls under his spell at one point. They don’t have sex, but when she masturbates, masses of butterflies flutter out.

Mainly, there is Doris. After her rough childhood she marries Pete, a gentle carpenter whom she meets while walking on the beach. He bobs in on a rubber raft, his boat having sunk. Years later, he goes on another boat ride, along with Doris’ lover, Frank Juniper Birdsong, and drowns after a mysterious accident. Doris blames Kitty, a child at the time, for the death; Kitty had forgotten to give Pete a telephone message that Doris had engineered to warn him against going out in the boat.

Years after that, Kitty is grown up and sleeping each afternoon with Frank. He is a patrician, a kind, handsome man, though weak--we are not entirely sure what happened in the accident--who is building a lakeside development. Somebody, however, is poisoning the fish.

Doris, who is jealous and depressed, makes a minor attempt at suicide. It braces her immensely; recovering, she ditches the town sheriff, her own afternoon sex partner. She takes Frank back from Kitty, gets the fish poisoning stopped and sets off a chain of events that pretty much destroys everyone in the vicinity. Last we see of Frank, he is paralyzed, unable to speak and in her arms.

It is a lurid story. For all the magic trimmings, the characters--witch-woman, dreamy, droopy daughter, crazy backwoodsman, evil sheriff, decaying Bourbon gentleman (complete with a tart mother who lives in perpetual happy bickering with her tart black cook)--are stock Southern Gothic.

Perhaps to underline Doris’ spookiness, Harrison uses a peculiar narrative device. As well as the main actor, she is the narrator. But she does not keep to the limits of a narrator who is also a character. She tells not only what she knows, perceives, feels and thinks but also what everyone else does, perceives, feels and thinks. Here she is with Kitty:

“I look at Kitty and smile. I must have looked tired and worn but she still thought I was very beautiful. It occurred to her with great force and clarity that I might be a remarkable woman.”

The effect is claustrophobic, no doubt deliberately so. But as we watch the magician’s tricks, he packs us up in his bag and lugs us away.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Uncle From Rome” by Joseph Caldwell (Viking) .