BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Pale and Fading Picture of Four Invisible Women : NOW YOU SEE HER <i> by Whitney Otto</i> ; Villard $20, 303 pages

Whitney Otto’s metaphor for white American women in their 40s is the same as Ralph Ellison’s for black American men of all ages. Kiki Shaw, with all her brightness and perception, isn’t an Invisible Woman yet, but she’s getting there.

She and the other 40-year-olds in “Now You See Her” are all trying to make their way, one way or the other, through the American Dream. The trouble is, they aren’t doing the dreaming. Men are doing it, 40-year-olds and others, and after a while the men switch dreams--to younger women or, in one case, temporarily back to their wives--and if Kiki and her friends are not quite gone, they are going, going. . . .

Collier, a whiz at running her video production company, has staked her entire emotional life on the occasional afternoons or weekends when Gordon, her married lover, can see her. Other times she might as well have disappeared. Conversely, when Gordon is regaling her with his sensitive and loving energy, it is his wife, Les, who might as well have disappeared.

Nora, with a talent for writing and a master’s degree in French, is secretary to a hot-shot executive; as he shoots up so will she, and if not, not. Meanwhile, she is his office wife. Instead of “where are my socks?” it is “where is my file?” At the office, his home wife is invisible; when he goes home, Nora is.

As for Kiki, who is floating and distracted by nature--she has a perfectly suited job assembling trivia for a television game show--her main not-quite-squeeze is the wonderfully imaginative and affectionate Henry. Almost he could be a computer-model devised to meet female objections to male defects, except that he lacks energetic constancy. He was her lover once and is trying conscientiously to recapture the dream, but his attention wanders.

Too bad for Kiki; parts of her begin to disappear--an arm, an elbow. A fellow worker enters her cubicle and leaves a note because he can’t see her. Alarmingly, her skin is praised for its translucence.

Otto, author of “How to Make an American Quilt,” treats her theme with wit and grace. Once more she works by patchwork: small scenes, distractions and reflections, seemingly diverse but stitched together to make a pattern.

There is something of Calvino’s buoyancy and wit in her fizzy alternation of half-absurd philosophizing and faintly surreal narrative. The rhythm, which is part of the charm, is reminiscent of Renata Adler’s “Speedboat.” There is a kinship with Nicholson Baker, too, in her use of miniature to place and unsettle us at the same time.

But Otto is dealing with an extremely well-worn theme, and although she embroiders it, she doesn’t really shift it. Collier’s plight as the Other Woman blurs nicely into her realization that it is the home-loving Gordon’s wife who is the Other Woman. He can’t be faithful even to infidelity.

Still, it takes more than embroidery to make a type into an archetype. Collier’s story is the stuff of decades of women’s magazines and television serials. The same is true of Nora’s secretary plight and of Les’s housewife plight, well-written as they are.

If Kiki’s plight takes longer to show itself--being so charmingly distracted by her de-materializings and wittily balanced series of variations on women and moon imagery--it is fairly inert when shown.

The movements Otto invents to escape the inertness are so contrived as to make it worse. Patly, Collier turns from Gordon to follow up an old yearning to play the piano, Les decides she doesn’t need him either, and Nora throws up her job and becomes a travel writer. Judging from the excerpts, she is not half so good a writer as Otto.

Kiki finds herself in Paris, where she communes with the lusty ghost of her namesake, Kiki of Montparnasse--Man Ray’s mistress, model and collaborator--and takes lessons in eating large meals and getting in Paglia-like touch with her own assertive womanhood. She will be happy in France, we are told, because women there are allowed to be themselves and, above all, visible to themselves.

This has some truth, although it is more likely that the French in general, not just women, are more visible to themselves than Americans are; at least those of Otto’s sophistication. A very visible society tends to make you visible, if only because you bump against its corners. Still, it is a cliche and used as such and--along with the three other pat endings--it turns “Now You See Her” from its initial effervescence into a fairly flat swallow.