Too Hip for Words : WHEN MEN TALK, PEOPLE LISTEN : THE MALE CROSS-DRESSER SUPPORT GROUP, <i> By Tama Janowitz (Crown; $20; 314 pp.)</i>

What if inside the shyest, most self-effacing girl there lurked a macho man of action? What if all we women had to do was chop our hair, throw on guys’ clothes and Presto! we’d get respect?

Believe it, says Tama Janowitz, author of “The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group” and three previous works of fiction. Men and women just aren’t that different from each other, except by popular consensus. We’ve decided to let men wear the power pants--and how women burn in hell because of that!

Take Pamela, a quivering floormop of a girl living a life of passive desperation in a New York City apartment. “All day Sunday I lay around in my dirty sweatpants and shirt until finally I decided to go to the store,” are her first words of introduction.

Lost boys and creepy men follow her home to her basement digs. Taxi drivers molest her. All day long in her job selling ads for a hunting magazine, she gets crunched under the high heels of the managing editor and almost everyone else in this Mickey Mouse operation.

Out in the world, she survives by ducking, apologizing and avoiding the shifty eyes of strangers. Inside, she rages and fumes, to the point where, as a narrator, she’s like some in-your-face, street-corner raver with a rant on any topic. For example: Tasteless, rotten food is a capitalist plot on the part of restaurants and grocery stores; information spewed out of TV, magazines and ad circulars is the mental junk snack of our time; the rich, however weak, sniveling and unattractive, are America’s royal family.

But while she can work herself into a lather over these and other favorite subjects (on men: “Even though . . . (they) weren’t exactly like real people, they still ruled the world”), it takes a revolution to show her that she can change her own life. Actually, three revolutions. First, Abdhul, a street boy, refuses to get lost; he becomes a surrogate son, giving her something beside herself to think about. Second, she gets fired from her awful job and her repressed rage almost brings the building down. Finally, when she and Abdhul need to skip town fast, her mother sends her to Maine in search of her missing father, who’s tied in to the rest of the plot mainly by his contributions to her psychopathology.

Assorted antics with a monkeyish dog, a severed head and a drug-crazed misfit follow. Then someone kidnaps Abdhul and Pamela is forced back to New York, disguised as a man to find her boy. There, needless to say, it’s a whole new ballgame for “Paul,” whose oblivious former enemies fawn over him and invite him everywhere, taking him for a wealthy playboy. When men talk, people listen. And when they smell money, they fall all over themselves.

In the hands of Janowitz--whose other books have savaged hip urbanites for their pretentiousness, greed and snarling hunger for power--Pamela’s story lurches from satire to slapstick, without asking too much from a reader’s emotions but delivering lots of silliness and wit. In its tone and comic staging the book borrows freely from bedroom farce, TV sitcoms and even Terry Southern’s classic “Candy,” whose fuddled heroine is always the last to see where things are headed. (One scene in which Pamela has a session with her quack “psychiatrist” in a busy bar recalls Candy’s “medical examination” in another bar’s men’s room.)

Pamela, though equally dim in the logic department, is a lot more eloquent than Candy, holding forth in a breathless, digressive flood that gives Janowitz’s novel its driving energy--and also its few moments of awkwardness. “Hence, after my parents’ divorce, like so many other women of her era, it was necessary for my mother to obtain a job in a local junior-high and high-school cafeteria in order to support her family with alimony supplement,” she sputters at one point.

Most of the time, though, her chatter is comforting and entertaining, especially once she gets past her do-nothing kvetching and passivity. She is someone who does her best. In a world that makes no sense--where roadside trash includes severed heads and parents abandon their children to TV and strangers--she tries to set a good example for a boy who isn’t even hers. “Take your vitamins, save your money and put it in a retirement plan,” she advises him, adding, “Verbally my advice is sound; I’m just not that good at the actual behavior part.”

She’s as good as she can be, though, and that’s the point. In this post-feminist era, when women still suffer from a lack of status and a lot of disillusionment, despite the promises of the women’s movement, Pamela is a kind of comic urban Everywoman. Despite a surfeit of support groups, there’s little help for her--or any woman trying to define herself and chart a reasonable course between work and motherhood. There’s even less support for one who lets her feelings get in the way of her lust for power.

True, Pamela doesn’t have much ambition, and she’s almost cartoonish in the personal chaos that surrounds her (not to mention in her obsessions with dirt, germs and general decay). But she’s loyal and courageous and it’s heartening to watch her find her way in the wilderness, despite all those who want to trample her.