BOOK REVIEW : Is It a Novel or a Literary Guessing Game? : WHISPER <i> by Carolyn Doty</i> , Scribner/Macmillan, $21.95; 288 pages

A book critic always has the problem of how to “tell” the plot of a novel and yet not “give it away.” In the case of “Whisper” this problem is almost insurmountable. It’s a question, perhaps, of structure rather than plot, but start to tell how the book is written, and the reader might as well not buy the book.

Skipping along the very surface of things, one can say that Ben Hastings--a man in prosperous early middle age who has one of those lives novelists just love to create and then break into smithereens--is stunned to find, one evening, that his father, taking a walk in upper Manhattan, has had a terrible stroke and is lying in a coma.

It’s very tough on Ben. He and his father have been partners in a highly successful investment banking firm, and while Ben has been diligent and hard-working, it’s his father who seems to have had the weird instinct for making money. His father has led a separate, mysterious life; no one seems to have known much about him.

Ben’s mother is not as broken up about her husband’s coma as she might be. She, too, has a separate life--she’s an elegant and beautiful matron who lives out on Long Island and spends inordinate amounts of time at the Bay Club, where long days pass in golf and tennis and round after round of martinis.

Ben’s pleasing wife, Addie--who seems in some ways to be more like Ben’s twin than his wife--spends most of her life at the club too. (You know that Addie is a goner when Ben notices she’s made up of the same color scheme as the house they live in.)

As Ben visits his comatose father, he becomes more and more aware of a seductive, flowery perfume. He recollects that a strange woman “found” his father and brought him to the hospital. Ben catches this woman in his father’s room. She halfheartedly lies about not knowing the mogul, but then, little by little, allows as how she might know him. And Ben’s single, monochromatic life is wedged, little by little, in two.

Against the mindless but essentially wholesome events at the office and the club, and females dressed eternally in tennis whites, this new woman, Dorothea, who was, of course, Ben’s father’s mistress, wears enchanting shades of lavender, peach, teal blue. Her home, covered floor to ceiling with books, is a mysterious cave furnished with tapestries and comfortable couches.

Dorothea has an unending supply of Scotch and fine wine and brandy and rich stews and fresh fruit and snacks. She has a love of--and a strange talent for--storytelling. If Ben’s mother and wife live in the one-dimensional “real” world, Dorothea’s world is a baffling maze where fact and fiction and just plain lies meet and dance together.

This is where it’s hard not to give away the plot. Maybe it can be said that if Ben had paid more attention to his English classes in college, he would be less apt to fall under Dorothea’s continuous spell. Maybe it can be said that all these books are in Dorothea’s apartment for a good reason.

She’s an elegant plagiarist of our finest 20th-Century English and American literature. Maybe it can be said that one of the things Dorothea does is retell the stories that make up a great deal of our culture, but from different points of view.

That is, if she happened to be telling the “Three Bears,” she might decide to tell it from the Baby Bear’s point of view, furious that some golden-haired bimbette had usurped his place in the bear family’s affections.

“Whisper” can be read, then, as a love story, a ghost story or as a literary game. I recognized six characters (or stories) whose function I dare not name, but about three went past me. If you know these “stories,” it’s one book; if you don’t, it’s another one altogether.

It’s hard to say how successful the novel is, or will be, because it depends upon the depth of the reader’s education or memory. I think you give this one to smart people as a sophisticated diversion--the literary equivalent of tournament dominoes.

Next: Bettyanne Kevles reviews “The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness” by Stanley Corn (Free Press).