BOOK REVIEW : Melodrama Redefined: Long-Lasting ‘Dreams’ : DREAMS OF LONG LASTING <i> by Mark Medoff</i> ; Warner Books $19.95; 466 pages

The time is the early ‘70s at Stanford University, and Jake Landau, the “hero” of this novel by playwright Mark Medoff (“Children of a Lesser God”), has just spent the obligatory night in jail that qualifies him as a bona fide revolutionary.

He’s perfected the pose; grown the wild red hair and beard, reduced his vocabulary to the single all-purpose verb, noun and gerund and taught himself how to act stoned when in fact he’s sober. Actually, the only aspect of the revolution that genuinely appeals to him is the sexual part. The rest is all pretense.

By Page 16 of “Dreams of Long Lasting,” the hair, the beard, the granny glasses and the fuzzy political convictions are gone. He’s even correcting other people’s grammar. Jake is revealed in his true colors: a pedantic doctoral candidate from Miami Beach, “someone in the process of becoming someone I never quite complete becoming before I wander onward toward not becoming the next someone.”

At a post-jail party, he has met The Woman who will haunt him for the next 450 pages--a ravishing, outrageously talented young actress who is pathologically unable to separate fact from fantasy. Although Jake and Leslie Ann become lovers virtually at once, months pass before he learns her real name, let alone her real life.

The ensuing relationship is a heady mixture of sexual bliss and mental torment, complicated by the presence of Howard Bellman, the student director who had controlled Leslie Ann’s various talents before the advent of Jake Landau.

Foul-mouthed and amoral even by the generous standards of the time, Bellman is surely one of the most repellent characters in recent fiction, an evil genie reappearing whenever the action seems to flag, which is often.

Even in a book where all the central figures are sexual prodigies, the possibilities are finite. The interstices must be filled somehow.

Flashbacks to Jake’s aborted adventures as a teen-age golf champion take up some of the slack, allusions to his father’s escape from the Holocaust add a desperately needed dimension to his character and a send-up of Miami Beach pretentiousness provides a note of corrosive levity. But for the most part, “Dreams” is a sexual odyssey of the 1970s, an exercise in nostalgia for a vanished era rapidly fading from living memory.

Having finished his dissertation in the short spaces between passionate interludes with Leslie Ann, Jake writes a play just for her, based on the horrific stories she’s told him about her childhood and adolescence. Although a bit rough around the edges, the tryout is a success, and Jake and Leslie seem destined for an idyllic, symbiotic life as playwright and live-in leading lady. Leslie Ann abruptly bolts, however, leaving Jake to spend the rest of the book acting out the title.

Returning to Miami Beach and his loving family, Jake consoles himself with his old sweetheart, an outwardly conventional young woman with a libido to match his own. Unlike Leslie Ann, Sandra Pollack is sane, an endearing trait that precipitates Jake into marrying her. To his amazement, she gleefully abdicates princess status and happily tools off to New Mexico with him, to embark upon the life of a faculty consort.

At this point, when the reader has every reason to hope that Jake has finally settled upon a permanent persona as a professor of American lit., evil Howard Bellman resurfaces with a plan to revive the play written for Leslie Ann.

Although the original star has vanished, a suitably unstable actress is cast in the leading role, and we seem about to have a virtual reprise of the earlier segment of the novel, complicated this time by the fact that Jake is married to Sandra. Throughout this period, Leslie Ann has been playing hide-and-seek with Jake by phone, finally appearing in the flesh in a most interesting condition as his play is about to open in New York.

In a conclusion that demands an entirely new definition of melodrama as well as a total a revision of the institution of marriage as we know it, “Dreams of Long Lasting” ends, for us if not for Jake Landau.