BOOK REVIEW : A Novel About Sex, Crime, Obsession and Deadly Lovers : HOMME FATALE, <i> by Paul Mayersberg,</i> St. Martin’s Press, $19.95; 352 pages

I can’t remember the exact wording now, but 20 years ago, the pornography laws regarding literature went like this: To be against the law, printed material had to 1) be utterly without redeeming social value, 2) appeal predominantly to the prurient interest and 3) go substantially beyond community limits of candor.

All three of these elements had to coexist or coalesce before a book could be judged against the law, which effectively opened the door to all books that verged upon the pornographic.

In some cases that was “good,” because Americans can read Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce without going to jail or paying substantial fines. On the other hand, a great deal of chaff--to change metaphors--has come to us along with the wheat.

“Homme Fatale” is a “smoldering” novel that could not have been published 40 years ago. Twenty years ago, it could have been defended vigorously and probably judged to be legal.

Now, it is pretty much what we read all the time, if we’re looking for something to “smolder” as we hold it in our hands and run our eyes over the print.

This is a novel about sex, crime, obsession. It sets up a world where concerns of sex triumph over all. How does one put it in a family newspaper? This novel is written to serve a definite purpose, and that purpose has nothing to do with the work ethic.

If we were back in the early ‘70s, how would we defend it? Vigorously! Is “Homme Fatale” utterly without redeeming social content? Absolutely not.

From the moment that Mason, an independent Hollywood agent, stands in a sleazy motel on location in Artesia, N.M., and watches a thin, white-faced woman with black hair drag a corpse (who looks a lot like Mason’s girlfriend) along a seedy hall, and they look up and encounter each other in the mirror, and then encounter each other again and again, as this mysterious brunette shows up as Mason’s new secretary back in Hollywood, we’re reminded of Luis Bunuel’s “An Andalusian Dog,” Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad” and Richard Murfet’s avant-garde Australian play, “Slow Love.”

Life is evanescent. Our erotic images stem from vivid illusive and allusive images. This book teems with redeeming social value.

But is its predominant appeal to the prurient interest? Well, yes, and so what? There’s a use for this sort of book.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead even wrote an essay about the sociological uses of porn in the late ‘50s.

She suggested: If you’ve been married to the same person for 21 years, don’t be unfaithful; open up a book and dream.

A feminist might object to certain woman-hating aspects of this book: the mysterious brunette places a gun in or near certain aspects of her own anatomy that don’t deserve it, but that’s the form for this kind of book.

If you don’t like it, as they say, don’t pick it up. (What does prurient mean, by the way? An interest in sex without the hint of a smile.)

Does “Homme Fatale” go substantially beyond community limits of candor?’ No. Not by now. You can write about anything by now, and this novel, if avant-garde in form, is traditional in content.

A man is living with a woman who bores him, then he meets a woman who doesn’t bore him.

She’s mad for him. She wears red underthings and motorcycle leathers. (She also reads Alison Lurie’s “The Nowhere City.” I admit, that’s unexpected.)

After the man has had sex with her a couple of hundred different ways, and she’s helpfully killed the two people who keep him from leading a happy life, he begins to tire of her.

She gets crazy, he goes back to blond girlfriend No. 1, and the brunette begins brandishing that gun of hers.

See, he’s the “homme fatale.” He’s a man who’s so “fatale” that all he has to do is step out of a swimming pool in his trunks to provoke this maelstrom of sex, passion, crime, high-heeled shoes, bruised orchids, torn clothes, shattered mirrors, recurring images, noisy sex scenes--yowls and howls from rooms public and private--and when it begins to get dull, it’s the woman in question who just keels over and dies, pretty as you please.

Summer is the season for fantasy, and this is male fantasy with oak leaf clusters. No harm done.

Nobody’s really dead, of gunshots or really fatal diseases. It’s just print on a page.