BOOK REVIEW : Novel Tries to Provide Answers to Women’s Searching Questions : LOOKING FOR LEO, <i> by Gloria Nagy,</i> Delacorte, $20; 352 pages

Maybe Freud’s question should not have been “What do women want?” but “How do women see things; what do women value?” “Looking for Leo” is at least the third novel this year (after Olivia Goldsmith’s “The First Wives Club” and Terry McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale”) that tries to give a thoughtful answer, couched in the terms of popular fiction.

What if women long for a family and friends above all else; what if they love, or want to love, their children more than anything else in the world? What if not loving your children, or betraying your friends, counts far more as a crime, in the end, than adultery? These might not be the answers that men want to hear to that fabled question, but that’s how Gloria Nagy has answered it.

This novel opens as Lindy Lampi--divorced, beautiful and employed as a personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman--waits helplessly in a New York hospital as her 12-year-old daughter, Tess, undergoes chemotherapy for leukemia. She needs a bone marrow transplant, and Lindy decides that because she herself is not a match, she must find her missing husband, Leo, to be the donor. (Why she didn’t think of this months ago? But that’s a question that shouldn’t be asked.)

To find the peripatetic Leo, Lindy enlists the aid of her oldest, best but estranged girlfriend, Willa, who grew up with Lindy in Beverly Hills in the 1950s. (Lindy thinks Leo loved Willa best, and she blames Willa for it.) But Willa, too, is alone, living with her teen-age son, Max, also by Leo. Hearing of Lindy’s plight, Willa is instantly by her side.

This is only the set-up. Leo is the kind of guy who turns up in almost every woman’s life. He’s the darling, the honey, the goofball, the romantic, the undependable, the irresponsible one. He’s not the man you’re supposed to marry; but every so often he’s so cute you can’t help yourself.

Lindy and Willa set out across the world to find Leo, leaving Tess in the care of Lindy’s own terrible mother, half-brother Max and a couple of other miscellaneous characters. As the search progresses, they turn up a range of extra wives and girlfriends, ranging in age from sixtysomething to twentysomething, and eventually one Bee Bee Day makes the traveling wifely twosome a threesome.

Naturally, a hunk like Leo isn’t going to hang out in a place like Liberal, Kan., where hard work and no glamour are the order of the day. He’s always just been seen in Hong Kong, or Florida, or the British Virgin Islands, so the three wives get to visit glorious places.

When they do find Leo, he’s getting ready to leave his current pregnant girlfriend. (The author gives him a reason for his capricious behavior, but it really doesn’t wash; there are too many guys around like Leo for them all to have been abandoned in Catholic convents by their uncaring moms.)

The question now becomes: Will Leo do the right thing and come back to give his kid a bone marrow transplant?

Just under Nagy’s plot are great verbose groundswells on what it’s like to grow up neglected in Beverly Hills, or how to become a successful nightclub singer, or what it’s like to go shopping in Hong Kong and--above everything else--how to construct a viable family out of odds and ends and castoffs and ex-wives. Good dinner parties, good champagne, the welfare of the children and the soundness of friendships count for everything in this novel.

Everyone is looking for Leo--for one more glance, perhaps, one more magic afternoon, and just a little snip of his bone marrow to keep the kid alive. But none of this large platoon of lovely ladies really wants him back. Loving mothers, family fun, great careers are, according to Nagy, what women want. A few months out of your life with Leo is enough, more than enough.