BOOK REVIEW : Spicy ‘Lemonade’ for Post-Feminists : MIDNIGHT LEMONADE <i> by Anne Goethe</i> . Delacorte; $21.95, 312 pages

In the succinct foreword to this engaging but predictable first novel, Katherine Pierson is hurtling down an Alabama road on her way to her father’s deathbed. Her three small children are asleep in the back of the station wagon, and she’s on the last leg of her frantic journey from North Carolina to her small home town in Louisiana when she runs over a German shepherd. She doesn’t stop, and the accident will haunt her ever after.

“If I had gone back for that dog . . . to lullaby him to his final rest, to get help if there could be help for him. . . . If I had done that, my father would have lived. I know this is true because I have set spells, made vows and kept bargains for the lives of my children. And they live.”

The lessons learned in a convent boarding school tend to stay imprinted upon the mind forever. Although Katherine’s years at Holy Name were the happiest times of her life, the academy’s strengths were history, poetry, theology and guilt. Understandably, the scholarly nuns tended to give short shrift to preparation for domestic life, which may partly explain why Katherine found herself married at 19 to a 31-year-old college professor, Eric Pierson.

After three months at a Chicago women’s college, she dropped out, convinced that “there was too much to learn about myself and I wasn’t ready.”

Back in Louisiana, she signs up to audit Dr. Pierson’s literature class and before she’s even attended one session, she and the professor are having dinner in the French Quarter, finishing each other’s favorite poems and marveling at how much they have in common.

Two months later she and Eric Pierson are married. Seven months later their first daughter is born.

Contrary to her expectations, marriage is not the maturing experience she envisioned. Her greatest charm for her husband is her naivete, and he does his best to keep her in a state of arrested sophistication. He calls her his “Elf-child.”

In the traditional mode of such novels, there’s a considerable amount of leaping back and forth from Katherine’s relatively untroubled girlhood to her hectic life as the mother of three and the wife of a philandering academic.

Although the ingredients are familiar, lashings of Cajun seasoning enliven the recipe. When Pierson becomes an assistant department head at a small university in the North Carolina hills, the addition of a few sassy and prematurely feminist faculty wives quickens the leisurely pace.

Bolstered by the support of her new friends, Katherine finds the nerve to leave Eric after his most flagrant affair, and her long-postponed maturity is finally under way. She parlays a part-time newspaper job into a career, juggling work and children, eventually acquiring a married lover.

Gently reared convent girl that she is, Katherine finds the road from marriage and motherhood to freedom and independence uncommonly perilous and exhausting. When Eric remarries and impulsively offers her a solution to her anguish, she seizes the opportunity, sending her children to live with her former husband.

This impetuous decision inevitably turns out to be the problem instead of the solution Katherine had hoped for, although the reader may be somewhat ahead of the protagonist in coming to that realization. Given Katherine’s background and training, we can hardly expect her not to embark upon a merry course of self-indulgence, and she doesn’t disappoint us.

By the end of the novel, she’s sadder, wiser and nearly grown-up. Her brief fling at hedonism over, she once again has her three children in the back of the wagon, having demonstrated to herself that having it all was a cruel myth perpetrated upon her generation.

In that special sense, “Midnight Lemonade” is the very model of that skeptical genre, the post-feminist novel.