BOOK REVIEW : A Tale of Love Potions and Love’s Power : THE LAW OF FALLING BODIES <i> by Jill Ciment</i> Poseidon Press: $19; 180 pages

This is a beautiful, saddening, one-of-a-kind novel. It’s about love, and what lasts in the world and how unbearably short our lives are. (All these are universal themes, it’s true, but this novel is as close as you can get to unique.)

Back in the early ‘60s, young Kim knocks around the country with her gorgeous, entrepreneurial, good-natured mother, Gloria. The two of them live in an aluminum trailer, and Gloria sells aphrodisiac perfumes to lonely men who fall into one of three categories: “the ugly, the lame and the mad.”

But Gloria, despite a certain scorn for her clientele, is unvaryingly kind to them. Beyond each perfume sale, each near-brush with the law, Gloria nourishes allegiance to a certain peculiarly American dream--that someday, whether it be through her perfumes or metal detectors or breast reduction creams--she, Gloria, is going to strike it rich.

But wealth isn’t what Gloria’s really after. She’s in it for the rush, the adventure, the amazement of it all. She intuits that America’s blood runs thick with dreams. She wants, more than anything, to get on the same wavelength as these vital apparitions. (But in real life, she’s just a middle-aged woman, living out of cardboard boxes in that trailer.)

And, she has that 15-year-old daughter, Kim, brought up in this way of life. It is Kim who tells their story.

One fateful night, “in a horrendous electrical storm in the hills above Los Angeles,” Gloria and Kim are run off the road by a middle-aged man named Arthur, driving a black Packard.

Gloria gets bonked on the head, and Arthur--who wildly flees from his home in a fit of despair because his wife has died in a car accident just eight months before--rescues both mother and daughter and takes them into his own house, a regular, lived-in house with a coffee table and book shelves and bamboo blinds.

Arthur, an aerospace engineer who is kindness itself, calls the doctor, gets their trailer repaired, makes them meals and goes off to work every day.

Gloria, recovering and increasingly antsy, dreams up the scheme of a mystical airplane; everyone buys a ticket, everyone is bound to get rich. Why not? Pyramid schemes are the order of the day--everyone seems to be buying into them. All you need to float the deal is a hotel room, a slew of customers, a few flossy brochures. Americans keep doing it all the time.

But with the quiet inevitability of a clock ticking, Kim, who spends the first half of this book just soaking in the wonderful domestic routine of an affectionately run house, falls for Arthur. She knows that Arthur and her mother are having a desultory affair and at some level Kim doesn’t care. She just wants to stay under the same roof with this wonderful man. The trouble is: She’s 15 and he’s 45.

Their jerry-built heaven isn’t going to last. The three of them live on those forever-sliding Los Angeles hills, and from their back yard they glimpse the occasional brush fire. Gloria’s mystical airplane scheme goes down in flames. Kim comes on too strong to Arthur, and the poor man, still in grief for his lost wife, caught between the amorous attentions of mother and daughter, simply disappears.

Flash forward only six years. Kim has grown up, finished college and is out on her own. Her mother maintains an increasingly grungy aphrodisiac-selling “empire” and keeps on having crack-brained ideas. She’s not so beautiful and appealing now--she’s 52--and though Kim loves Gloria, her mother is beginning to drive her around the bend.

One of Gloria’s most cherished fantasies is to appear on “What’s My Line,” and she finally does--stumping the experts on that venerable TV game show--who can’t figure out that what Gloria does is sell aphrodisiacs. A flood of perfume orders come predictably whooshing into the mail box where Gloria has rigged her trailer. In the same batch of mail, a letter from Arthur appears. . . .

Which is where the real story begins. What about this “love” business? Can you trust it? What about the conventional wisdom that says you should certainly stay away from a man 30 years your senior, especially if he’s slept with your mother? What about age; what about irrevocable death? And what about the crazy, visionary Gloria, rolling around in the desert out in her trailer, who loves her daughter above all things?

This is the kind of story that could be told in an altogether salacious way. Seeing from a certain slant, it might be Woody Allen’s story or a coarse pulp fantasy sold in adult book stores. But this is a story about love, which though it can’t defeat death, can at least fight it to an honorable draw.