Feminist Fatale : AMAZON, <i> By Barbara G. Walker (HarperCollins: $15; 178 pp.)</i>

If “Amazon” is the new feminist novel, then give us back our aprons.

This tale gives us Antiope, a “beautiful young Amazon warrior spirited thousands of years through time” into our urban present. She is a “bold, beautiful, sword-brandishing” woman who goes off on a vision quest (half-naked) in her own era and awakens, inexplicably, on the side of a freeway--where a carload of men stop to rape her. When they are foiled, they shoot her instead.

Fortunately, the next passing vehicle contains a writer named Diana who takes Antiope home, studies her and writes a best-selling book about her. Then what do these women with their collective wisdom and insight chose to do with themselves? Why, they go on TV talk shows! Antiope makes a video of her warrior-exercise routine, and Diana is eventually shot by a man who, presumably, can’t abide females in sandals.

Through their media celebrity, Antiope and Diana meet Mattie Bloodworth, one of the richest women in the whole world. Coincidentally, Ms. Bloodworth is just putting the finishing touches on a temple she has built to worship the Goddess. She immediately recognizes Antiope’s authenticity and invites her into an inner circle of enlightened, goddess-worshiping women.

This book is entirely filled with sub-dimensional caricatures. It is a contrivance of implausible plot developments and dialogue of the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” variety. When Antiope first sees automobiles, she describes them as “coming with a roar like a hundred charging lions.” As she learns English, she speaks as if she were a Women’s Studies undergraduate ruthlessly pursuing her thesis. The effect is ironically (and unintentionally) anti-feminist, a stereotypical presentation of females as either scantily clothed beauties or wealthy eccentrics who spend afternoons lyrically skipping through the misty woods doing Maypole dances.

It is inexplicable that the author, who is a “women’s historian,” has written a novel utterly bereft of history, resonance, nuance and complexity. For this material to work, she might, for starters, have engaged in the use of literary devices. There is a long tradition of works employing variants of the “Sleeping Beauty” motif. The author seems unaware of this, and has missed the opportunity to describe the texture of two different worlds, to define their distinct feel, taste, smell, their character and psychology. How does a woman warrior perceive the world? How does she think?

Rather than giving the reader a female version of, say, Huxley’s Savage from “Brave New World,” this author has devised a generic warrior who does not think at all. She is a premise pulled awkwardly through the author’s confused external agenda and only randomly dramatized.

At the end of this dismal exercise in fraudulent feminist rhetoric, Antiope returns to her own time, and, with a cliche science-fiction flourish, reaches into her amulet pouch and finds a pebble from the future. So it wasn’t just a dream! Of course, if she had brought back an M-16, she might have single-handedly wiped out the enemies of her goddess-worshiping people and changed history. Now that might have produced a real novel. As it is, this is merely a very minor disaster.