BOOK REVIEW : A Long Look Under the Hood of Fast Cars : CONFESSIONS OF A FAST WOMAN, <i> by Lesley Hazleton,</i> Addison Wesley, $15; 198 pages

I read “Confessions of a Fast Woman,” a tough little collection of essays, with a double thrill. One of those thrills was the thrill of recognition.

Here’s the opening paragraph: “It began in the spring of 1988. That was when I drove at twice the speed limit. I was in a Porsche 911, and I’d never been in one before. It was a revelation. It was a seduction.” As the former owner of a silver 1969 Porsche 911S (with a Targa top), I know where author Lesley Hazleton is coming from--literally.

It has to do with speed; it has to do with noise, it has to do with contempt, aggression and disdain. Every divorced woman should own a Porsche with a slightly defective muffler. There’s no better car on Earth for driving away from something.

As the author points out early on, “Fast Woman” has to do with “transgressions.” Women aren’t supposed to drive or even to know about these kinds of cars. But perhaps humankind in general isn’t supposed to drive that fast.

Hazleton reminds us that a race driver’s pulse ordinarily goes up to about 200 and stays there for the duration of a race. She reminds us of the Icarus legend, the urge to fly too high, the arrogance of the human spirit--and then ties that myth to fast cars.

She reminds us that Henry Ford is “said to have helped bankroll Hitler’s Munich Beerhall Putsch, and in 1938 he accepted the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for a non-German.” (Ford was called “an industrial fascist” and “the Mussolini of Detroit” by the New York Times.)

Then Hazelton ties all this mad car supremacist business into the wonderfully mean fun people have passing other people on highways. The internal combustion engine--wow!--better than illicit sex and just as bad for you, since its pollution destroys the air we breathe. Hazleton acknowledges this paradox. She considers herself an environmentalist, but she loves fast cars.

There are three essays here. The first is all about car races and test drives and ancient myths. The second--a perfect piece of work!--is about her apprenticeship to two master mechanics. Hazleton suggests that to get past her dizzy love of fast cars, she needs to take a good look into “the belly of the beast.”

She portrays the master mechanic as perfect soldier--useless and a mere member of the working class when you don’t need him but a mythic creature with godlike qualities when you do.

The meditations here on physical injury, on grease, on bad days in the garage are spectacular. (And it’s oddly consoling that the automobile manufacturers are just as oblivious to the needs of mechanics as they are to the needs of drivers: The descriptions here of simply trying to get a filter off certain models are astonishing.)

Of course, any sordid, pleasing, down-and-dirty love affair must come to an end. Hazleton knows at some level that she--and the rest of humanity--must someday give up the cheap thrills of the internal combustion engine: “Most of the energy in it goes to waste in the form of pollution.”

She confesses, “I began to feel as though I were in a classic love affair turned sour.” She journeys to Darwin, Australia, to watch a solar-powered electric car race and likes it very much, but none of it feels right to her: “An electric car was a castrated car. . . . Everything you love about cars will be gone--the noise of vibration, the sense of raw power, how could you even imagine yourself in an electric car?”

These are fairly complex issues. At one level, you’ve got to move along with technology or you risk becoming an illiterate or an old fud, forever fiddling with your pickup or your manual typewriter while everyone else is into laptop computers or gliding, silent cars.

How to get your id to come into alignment with your intelligence is the problem. For me, it came when I barely got out of a drag-racing ticket with a pimply-faced teen-age Marine. Not appropriate. Time to move along to the next phase in transportation life.

Hazleton, of course, is much more elegant. She postulates that the id is always shuffling and snuffling along two or three steps behind our brain; that “human movements will never be able to keep up with the human imagination.”

She offers spooky speculations on a new kind of “cool” electric car that will allow us to keep our risk-taking outlaw mentality, without ripping the breathable air off the planet.

I haven’t done justice to this remarkable book. But I’m not worried. I don’t think anyone could.