Cousine, Cousine : POET AND DANCER, <i> By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Doubleday: $19.95; 199 pp.)</i>

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a writer of great vision. In her previous novels and story collections--15 books in all--she has bridged the worlds of East and West as no other writer of her generation has done, producing small masterpieces that chronicle the lives of middle-class urban Indians, displaced Europeans and spiritually obsessed Americans with equal acerbity and sensitivity.

Born in Germany, educated in England, married to an Indian architect and now a resident of New York City, Jhabvala has made each of these cultures a part of her fiction. “Everyone is so estranged, no one is rooted,” she once said in an interview. “That’s what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting.”

Each new work has been marked by a shrewd understanding of the perilousness of human relationships, and by a wry and ironic wit. Her early novels, such as “The Householder” and “Esmond in India,” were set in India, where Jhabvala lived for 24 years until the heat and dust and omnipresent poverty of that country drove her into the arms of America. She came to America, she said, because she needed the “violent stimulation that only a big, coarse country with terrible things happening in it can give you”--and after India, she found “only America really, really big and coarse and bizarre and desperate enough.”

Her new novel, “Poet and Dancer,” is set in New York and features a racially mixed cast made up of German emigres and displaced Indians. Once again, Jhabvala has given expression to her old themes of rootlessness and the tensions and mysteries of family life. But love is her real subject in “Poet and Dancer”--love in its most consuming, obsessive form. It is not the love between a man and a woman she is talking about here but the despairing, abusive, worshipful attachment of two girl cousins, one the predator, the other the prey.

Lara and Angel Manarr, cousins who first meet as children in the New York apartment of their German-Jewish grandparents, are as opposite to each other as, say, Madonna and Cynthia Ozick. Lara is beautiful, extroverted, and completely self-absorbed, a would-be dancer with little artistic talent; her cousin, Angel, is a sensitive but unattractive girl, introverted, yet naturally gifted as a poet.

As children of divorced parents, both Lara and Angel seem damaged, one by a lack of parental love, the other by having been suffocated by it. Lara’s mother committed suicide. Her father, Dr. Hugo Manarr, is a psychoanalyst who teaches methods of self-perfection--”a charming man but not really approachable.” Angel’s mother, Helena, is one of those fretful, unhappy women who focus all their attention on their children in order to relieve the bitter disappointments of life. In the spacious, old-world atmosphere of their apartment, Angel and her mother live cloistered lives, their only friends an Indian woman named Mrs. Arora and Mrs. Arora’s son, Rohit, who, like Angel, is abnormally sensitive and giving.

For Angel, this contained existence represents safety: “It seemed to her that any going out into the world was a scattering of her senses, and of some store of inward resources she wanted to keep intact.” She matures into a young woman ripe with loneliness and a sense of unworthiness, and when her beautiful cousin Lara begins turning to her for companionship, for solace during her wildly erratic moods, Angel feels flattered and energized, as if her life has finally been given purpose.

But Lara proves to be a dark angel of deliverance. She has grown into a tormented young woman, spinning dark webs of paranoia inside her head. Sexually promiscuous, Lara sleeps with a doorman, with strangers off the street, and finally with Angel’s own father, Peter, who temporarily falls under her spell and arranges for Lara and Angel to move into an apartment together. There, the stage is set for inevitable tragedy. Lara grows increasingly paranoid and neurotic, all the while abusing, using, manipulating those around her, particularly her devoted, obeisant cousin, whom she alternately scorns and coddles. Rarely in fiction has such a tortured relationship been given more vivid dimensions.

Jhabvala, who has in recent years become known for her work as a screenwriter on such Merchant-Ivory films as “Howard’s End,” “A Room With a View” and “The Europeans”--novels long thought to be “too interior” for adapting to film--has said that watching the editing of a movie, an activity that fascinates her, has led to a fluid movement back and forth in time in her more recent novels.

This is evident in “Poet and Dancer.” As Lara spins increasingly out of control and Angel becomes ever more obsessed in her devotion, the scenes between them unfold in an almost cinematic fashion, with the cool detachment of things seen from a distance. There isn’t a hint of sentimentality in the novel, yet emotions run intensely high throughout.

“Poet and Dancer” is a very subversive view of eros indeed. The novel completely attacks the accepted assumptions about love, as if to say: In these matters, not only is there always the pursuer and the pursued, but the devourer and the devoured.

The Indian poet R.K. Ramanujan once wrote, in an essay in a book called “The Mind of India,” that the main paradigm for understanding anything in India was the guru-disciple relationship. Lara and Angel are the guru and the disciple run amok. And Jhabvala, though she has said she would never again confine herself to writing about India, seems to have been so deeply affected by her years in that formidable country that she cannot help but infuse her fiction--even stories set in such a big, coarse and bizarre city as New York--with Indian undertones: the seeker done in by a honeyed mixture of devotion and sexuality, the hapless individual caught up by fate.

In the final analysis, “Poet and Dancer” is a most painful book, and a frustrating one, not because of any lapse on the part of the storyteller but rather because it succeeds so well in chronicling such abuse, such toadying, the complete annihilation of the human soul in the name of love.

Yet the writing soars, and one feels irresistibly caught up in the story. Jhabvala is particularly effective in contrasting human lives dwarfed by the city, where buildings are skeletons that “roar up enormously into the cold sky.” Old-world sensibilities, whether those of Mrs. Arora or Angel’s aging German grandmother, are absorbed by the quick pace, the furious energy of the city. Servants and masters alike are caught up on the same wheel of envy, hatred and jealousy. Tradition dissolves into paradox, melting like ice into a new and unrecognizable river.

Above all, fate plays its part. As someone says at the tragic conclusion of “Poet and Lover,” “You can’t help people: they do what they think they have to do.”