BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Quirky Dialogues on Performance Art and Reality : CONVERSATIONS WITH SHERYL SUTTON: The Novel of a Dialogue, <i> by Janos Pilinszky</i> . <i> Translated from the Hungarian by Peter Jay and Eva Major</i> . Sheep Meadow Press. $17.95, 111 pages

Reviewers, Lord love us, may mismatch our socks and dent our fenders like everyone else, but about books we’re supposed to be authorities. You, the readers, want to know two things: What is “Conversations With Sheryl Sutton” about? And is it any good? It’s my job to answer those questions and, if possible, give you something extra besides.

Nothing looks worse in a review than a simple confession of ignorance. Yet the truth is: I have only a vague idea of what this experimental novel is about. And it may be good, but how good only a reader a lot more erudite than I (and, let’s face it, than most of you too) would be qualified to say.

I could finesse this, of course. Reviewers have ways of disguising their intellectual inadequacy. I could talk about the author, Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky (1921-81). I could dwell on the social and historical background: He was in prison camps during World War II; later, under Hungary’s Communist regime, which banned his poetry for 10 years, he eked out a living as a columnist for Catholic publications. I could talk about the theater: Much of “Conversations” is a treatise on what we now call performance art.

Anything but the book itself.

The neatest trick--in fact, the one I’ll use here--is to talk about the book after all, but only about those parts of it I can understand. The idea is that its readership, at best, will be small and select.

Pilinszky’s true audience will be smart enough to find it even without the aid of my crude finger-pointing; the rest of you won’t be able to call my bluff.

To begin, then: Paris, 1973. A man and a woman.

The man, Pilinszky, is in his 50s and ailing (although the bout of pneumonia he suffers in the novel may be just “a wry acknowledgment of his hypochondria,” co-translator Peter Jay says). The woman, Sheryl Sutton, is another real person, an American actress, then 23, appearing in the Robert Wilson play “Deafman Glance,” a work that highly impressed Pilinszky.

In life, Pilinszky and Sutton met briefly at a cafe and later talked for several hours. In the novel, they have a number of long, deeply philosophical conversations. Their relationship, although platonic, is intense. Sutton nurses Pilinszky back to health, sometimes sleeping on the floor beside his sickbed. She reads his works, acts out dramatic scenarios that they make up and cooks him his favorite potato goulash.

Do we expect a contrast between the world-weary European and the raw, primitive Yank? Whatever the real Sheryl Sutton may be like, Pilinszky’s Sutton is fully his equal in intellect and sophistication.

Their dialogue, set down unadorned as in a play, is so elliptical and poetic that Jay admits: “There are a few passages so baffling that nobody we have turned to has been able to shed light on them.”

Pilinszky himself puts it best: This so-called novel is “the only book of essays I am capable of writing.”

The subject of those essays--of the conversations--is what possibilities are left for art after the horrors of the 20th Century. The aim, Pilinszky says, is to become a “citizen of the universe,” not merely of the world.

“Masterpieces are beyond boredom, not before it,” he says. “What now disturbs me in modern literature is that it doesn’t dare run the risk of boredom,” as Tolstoy’s novels and Bach’s music did. Sutton finds in Wilson’s play and in performance art a path around the conventions of realistic theater to a direct confrontation with reality, the silence and wholeness of Greek tragedy and religious ritual.

This is, finally, a book of wonders. It’s a wonder that the chance meeting between Pilinszky and Sutton gave rise to such a singular work. That Jay and Eva Major spent years translating it. That Sheep Meadow-Carcanet published it, with what must have been little hope of commercial gain. In short, that “Conversations,” quirky and brave, exists at all--waiting for the right readers to come along. And reviewers be damned.