BOOK REVIEW : Search for Elusive Lovers : ROSE REASON, <i> by Mary Flanagan</i> , Harcourt Brace Jovanovich $23.95; 400 pages

Well into the last third of this excessively long novel, the narrator’s lover gives her a new surname--”Rose Reason--all sanity and grace, mistress of linear and lateral thinking.” That line should convince us that he’s a villain, because only a pathological liar could call Rose reasonable.

Years before, she had renamed herself, replacing “Frances” with “Rose” on her confirmation day, hoping that a floral name would brighten her drab life. “I have covered the face of Frances with a new expression which I wear like a Communion veil. . . . I can read the relief in people’s eyes and already I know that it will be better being Rose.”

Certainly she hasn’t had much fun being Frances. Her vivacious, affectionate mother died when she was only 11, and her fond but feckless father sent her to live with her spinster Aunt Bernadette in Florence, Me., a rapidly declining mill town where life revolved around the two rival Catholic churches, one showy and French-Canadian and the other austere and Irish.

Despite the new name, Rose’s girlhood is lonely and bleak. After a day in the mill, her middle-aged aunt has neither the time nor the energy for her young charge, who must not only fend for herself but also constantly show her gratitude to Aunt Bernadette. She lives for her father’s visits and calls, but those diminish after he remarries.

She’s consoled throughout her sad adolescence by loyal and devoted Frank, virtually her only friend in town. When her aunt’s health fails and Rose seems destined to wither away in Florence as unpaid nurse and poorly paid schoolteacher, matters suddenly take a turn for the better. Frank introduces her to Travis, a handsome and mysterious young man who has somehow found his way to Maine. Within a week, Rose and Travis are lovers, and the town of Florence seems almost endurable until Travis vanishes as abruptly as he had arrived.

Summoning her entire stock of determination, Rose puts her ailing aunt into a convalescent home and sets off in search of the love of her life. Travis has dropped a few hints, leading her to believe that he might turn up on New York’s Lower East Side.

The clues are unfounded, but by then Rose is ensconced in a ratty loft, a venue that at least offers some glimpses of the East Village in the process of transformation into Soho. After the claustrophobia induced by the Maine chapters, Soho comes as a relief.

After Travis fails to materialize, Rose is befriended by a free spirit named Hadley, who introduces her to a group of like-minded neighborhood types. The time is the late ‘60s, and Rose’s spirits finally begin to lift. She’s still obsessed with finding Travis, but she takes time off to work as a waitress and participates, guiltily, in the sexual revolution.

When Aunt Bernadette finally dies, some of Rose’s misery evaporates. A tiny legacy, discovered providentially, enables her to go to a Greek island, still ostensibly in search of the elusive Travis. There she finds Miles, a young man who seems to be a kind of exponential Travis--ineffably more glamorous, mysterious and evasive, as well as faintly sinister.

Naturally Rose falls hopelessly in love with him, and naturally he also disappears.

Just as Travis did, Miles looks eerily like Rose herself. In fact, everyone Rose has ever loved--her father, her woman friend Hadley and both Travis and Miles--closely resembles the narrator. That circumstance, continually re-emphasized, tends to make the story of Rose Reason disconcertingly redundant; a series of disastrous encounters with mirror images.

In any case, her obsession with Miles exceeds even her obsession with Travis, and she embarks upon a second mission, this one taking her to London and the house of an elderly and eccentric European woman.

There she works as a maid, patiently awaiting the reappearance of Miles. Eventually she’s rewarded, though not for long. When Miles resurfaces, he reveals himself as one of the more preposterous characters in recent fiction, quite unworthy of Rose’s devotion and self-sacrifice.

Perhaps he, Travis and even Hadley are really the same person after all; mere facts of Rose in search of herself. Certainly the melodramatic, cataclysmic ending is more than enough for the entire crowd.