BOOK REVIEW : A Feisty Heroine With Zero Credibility : SORROW FLOATS, <i> by Tim Sandlin,</i> Henry Holt, 352 pages; $21.95

Luckily, this is a pluralistic society. Luckily, there are plenty of readers to go around. Luckily, there’s room in this country for every kind of fantasy, every kind of story.

But I’m going to be the sourpuss here and suggest that a mountain man kind of guy has as much business writing about a young woman, age 23, who had her first baby at age 14, as I have writing about the world of Paris high fashion.

(Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been to Paris. I watched that lady on CNN with the silly haircut talk every Saturday morning about the world of high fashion. I borrowed a Galanos dress once, but if I tried to write a novel about Paris high fashion, I’d be in trouble: “Pierre! Donnei-moi le zipper!” See what I mean?

I’m in the minority here. Other people seem to love these novels that Tim Sandlin writes about his feisty heroine, Maurey Pierce Talbot. This, “Sorrow Floats,” is his third one, I believe. But I have trouble with the touching mother-daughter scene where Maurey and her daughter Shannon, “the 7-year-old and the 21-year-old,” pierce each other’s ears with knitting needles.

“We ended up with blood and ice cream all over us,” Sandlin has his heroine say. “Being a mom can be more fun than sex or alcohol put together.”

Where was the editor? Why does it have to be the sourpuss critic who says: No, females generally use regular needles and a cork to pierce their ears, and there’s no blood at all. And you’d never in a million years use knitting needles unless you planned to string yourself up with heavy twine.

This is a small detail. Here’s a larger objection: Maurey lives in Gros Ventre (or Gro Vent, take your pick.) She gets pregnant at 13, has Shannon on her 14th birthday and yet she tells us: “At 15, I’d been regarded as the prettiest girl in the Valley. Maiden Aunts and horny politicians said so all the time. . . . The only good to come of my downfall was to all those mothers who once said to their dog-faced daughters, ‘Just you wait, about the time you bloom, she’ll be mud on a boot.’ ”

Well, a year after you’ve had an illegitimate child in a very small town in the West, you--all things considered--already are mud on a boot, especially in 1963, when Shannon was born.

So I don’t believe this book, and I don’t believe the “feisty” narrator. When her dad dies and she sends postcards to him in San Francisco, I can’t believe it. When she gets drunk and drives off with her second baby on top of the car like an ill-cared-for purse, I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel except: My! What an imaginative author!

Once again hampered by reality, I have trouble with the two engaging members of AA who persuade Maurey to drive across the country selling contraband six-packs of Coors. I just don’t think AA members in good standing would do that. Once this lovable (?) trio gets on the road, they pick up a lot of characters, and everything else picks up as well.

But there’s another whole weird consideration about 23-year-old Maurey Pierce Talbot. She really can’t stand men. She’s fond of Shannon’s father but has no romantic feeling for him. She loathes her current husband. She hasn’t had a physical thought about a man in years. If a woman wrote this disrespectfully about the bodily fluids of the male sex, she’d catch green hell for it. So what is Sandlin up to?

I’m sure he’ll be compared to Larry McMurtry, who writes about women so beautifully, but Mr. McMurtry knows what he’s talking about. I just hope Tim Sandlin doesn’t get it into his mind to pierce anybody’s ears. There’d be ice cream and blood and green hell to pay.

One more thing. If Maurey hates men so much, why does she pick a sick, sociopathic, doped-up pervert to have a fling with? Just because she’s drunk? What is the author saying about drink here? That it will make you sleep with murderous villains? Can this be true? Are there studies to back this up? Other readers, who will be sure to love this book, will have to make that call.