BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Story--and Characters--of Little Substance : BONDAGE <i> by Patti Davis</i> ; Simon & Schuster $23, 338 pages

Children’s television shows are supposed to do more than just sell licensed products to impressionable kids. Programming should have some inherent merit; then, if it wins those wee hearts and minds, as “Sesame Street” has done, it earns the right to exploit the connection with every conceivable kind of toy and game.

Don’t adults deserve similar consideration? Shouldn’t a novel have a higher purpose than simply selling lots of books?

If I sound cranky, I have cause. Ex-First Daughter Patti Davis (who, God knows, must have a treasure trove of material that she could transform into fiction) has written a novel about what it’s like to be in sexual thrall to someone--to give yourself up, past reason, despite the fact that every warning light on your spiritual dashboard is flashing.

To provide the illusion that this is a multidimensional story, she has a subplot about the heroine’s friend, who is enslaved both figuratively (by her sorry past) and literally (by a pop culture messiah selling dime-store salvation). But she pays as little attention to the story’s framework as she can get away with.

The main character, Sara, was jumped by three of the neighbor boys when she was 12, fought them off, and decided right then to learn everything she could about the opposite sex so she would never again fall prey to one of them.

That enough foreshadowing for you? Fast forward: Sara’s gone Hollywood, become a costume designer, befriended Belinda (possessed of a tragic secret) and met Anthony the famous director, a man who, with a single laser glance, cuts through all those decades of defensiveness. Sara is all over him--and him, her.

She does things she swore she would never do--some of them printable, such as turning down work to follow Anthony to Paris, and some of them not, such as the episode involving the starlet or the stuff about alternate uses for bathrobe sashes and silk scarves.

Will our heroine hit bottom, and can she bounce back? Is there any dastardly sexual deed that Anthony won’t consider? Does anyone really believe that Belinda (clearly a descendant of the little guy with the black cloud over his head in the L’il Abner comic strip) will pick herself up, dust herself off, and start all over again?

If you care, you’ve put more effort into reading the book than Davis put into writing it. Let’s start with the characters. Anthony starts out sounding promisingly dark--until he heads off to Paris to direct a banal romance, at which point any alert reader flips back to the first description to make sure it’s the same guy. Has he taken early philosophical retirement? Is he falling in love with love and losing his edge? We don’t know enough about him to guess. A clue would have been nice (she says he’d decided “to try a safe, non-controversial film,” but she doesn’t tell us why).

But then, how much do we know about Sara? She has long brown hair and split ends. She has an active fantasy life. She’s ambivalent about what’s happening and unsure of what to do. Hello; could we have another helping?

Ann Beattie, that master of minimalist fiction, always manages to suggest that she knows everything about her characters and has simply chosen to share certain evocative details with the reader. Davis, unfortunately, gives the opposite impression--that she hasn’t thought through the material, that what you see is all she’s got.

The sad thing is, Davis seems to believe that withholding is a viable approach to life--that the more you keep to yourself, the better off you are. Belinda and Sara are destroyed by intimacy, in a way, or by their stultifying inability to put bad news behind them. Maybe Davis is saying men are jerks and should be avoided, except that they can be fun in bed. Maybe she’s saying women are fools.

Or maybe, just maybe, Davis is smarter than the rest of us: She knows that sex sells, and it doesn’t need any fancy wrapping to make it walk out of the store. A plain brown wrapper will do, which is all she’s given us. There might have been a better book here, a braver one, if she’d been willing to give into it a bit more.