I Am a Chimera : CONGLOMEROS, <i> By Jesse Browner (Random House: $21; 242 pp.)</i>

Jesse Browner’s “Conglomeros” owes so much to so many predecessors--from “Frankenstein” to “Lolita” to “E.T.”--that one almost doesn’t know where to begin in terms of chronicling its allusiveness. But this first novel’s cultural antecedents are handled with such deftness and slyness, and synthesized to such good purpose, that the overall effect is beguiling: a collage of familiar images that becomes a single new thing.

The novel tells the story of world-weary dilettante Aaron X, who discovers, first in the surrealist art of a painter from the ‘20s, and then alive in the trackless forests of, naturally, Transylvania, a creature called the Conglomeros, which has a large, slightly elongated head, “almost embryonic in the smoothness of its features and the prominence of its eyes.”

That, however, is just the beginning: Where its ears would be, it has two small arms, “like little tentacles, long enough perhaps to reach around and cover the eyes,” and beneath the head, three pubescent bodies, “a female sandwiched between two males.” “Though hardly human,” we’re told, “the smiling creature exuded a soft, hebetic sensuality,” and gamboling in its pastoral paradise, it appears impossibly innocent, curious, serene and alluring.

So Aaron, a well-intentioned Satan trying to improve on Eden, quickly resolves to return with it to America as its “guardian and educator.” He smuggles it out and sequesters it on a country estate in the Catskills, where he introduces it to man and his civilization. Like Frankenstein’s monster, it learns language; like Lolita, it becomes a sexual plaything. As with Humbert, the clarity and keenness of Aaron’s sensual appreciation masks its utterly solipsistic nature. In possession of a being so ingenuous and unconditionally loving, the perfect tabula rasa upon which all of his desires and needs can be inscribed, Aaron is able to “foresee a lifetime of loneliness expunged, of emptiness abrogated and happiness fulfilled.” They run naked through the leaves. They stroll the forest with birds as companions.

“What sort of creature could be both as hideous as a spider and as seductive as a siren?” Aaron wonders, and one of the novel’s impressive achievements is its coherent portrait of the title creature’s incoherent physicality--this is, after all, “a monster that possessed three sets of genitalia but no navel.” The grace, the sensuality, the absurdity, the fragility and the monstrous fascination of its corporeality are made concrete, while its overall impossibility seems to enhance the novel’s playfulness rather than explode its premise.

The creature’s personality is handled with an engaging mix of slyness and sweetness, producing something like a nonsentimental E.T., if the notion is not too oxymoronic. And whenever we get too close to the ludicrous, we’re reminded, with a kind of prim dignity, that the ludicrous is part of the point: “And as for any unanswered questions about how a human being makes love to a creature possessing eight arms, six legs, two penises, and one vagina--may they remain unanswered.”

For Aaron, his find is a combination of Kaspar Hauser and the Wild Child: “baby, wild beast, and sylvan silenus all in one, very much the ‘Image of Uncreated Reality’ ” on which he can impose his will, create in his own image. Determined to make the Conglomeros “more human” so that he might “understand and appreciate it all the better,” Aaron leads it from language to abstract thought, believing, in his spectacular hubris, that he can “protect it from the corruptions of mankind while imbuing it with the exaltations of humanity.” His hopeless desire: “I wanted it to remain simple and gentle, but I also wanted it to have the capacity to describe itself to me.” But the Conglomeros’ serenity and beauty is based on its lack of consciousness; once that consciousness is acquired, it goes from the monstrously beautiful--something extra-human--to simply the monstrous--a parody of the human.

From there it’s a short step to public television, cigarettes after sex, the East Village performance-art scene, and a large part of the novel’s satire. Consciousness for the creature largely means that “the more it analyzed, the less it seemed to understand,” final proof that it had “crossed the threshold into humanity,” as the new Conglomeros--Connie--insatiable for things to do, places to go, people to see--takes the downtown scene by storm.

In a world of everyone trying to be different, who can compete with Connie? The former image of perfect innocence becomes a messianic evangelist for a psychobabble that espouses “the philosophy of consolation without hope through the applied science of self-deception,” a cracked version of Existentialism that brings “the self into existence not through the exercise of freedom but through the science of self-deception.” It remains, then, Aaron’s doomed mission to retrieve and restore his loved one, like Elsa the lion, to its original state.

“Conglomeros” is continually funny about the ways in which the quiet magic of the supernatural can no longer compete with the roar of the modern world, and like “Lolita,” it’s a satire that becomes a moral history, an exposure of the self-righteous lethality of Aaron’s solipsistic “love” for his creature--one of the operating ironies throughout is our understanding of where the real monstrousness resides--and a chronicle of the progress of his sorrow.

The satire and moral history converge in his understanding that “The problem remains that no crime is a mistake and every mistake a crime in a moral universe, and that we human beings cannot help but be criminals and fools. I am in no position to preach but I am in a position to know, for I made a criminal mistake. I decided to abduct”--and so destroy--”the Conglomeros.”

That leaves Aaron finally in the heartbreaking position of not only understanding that he has “lost someone’s love, fidelity, respect, and trust,” but also that he has deserved to.