BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Exploring Unknown Territories of Love and New York : SOME GIRLS <i> by Kristin McCloy</i> ; Dutton $20.95, 320 pages

A simple tale can be made fresh and unique only when a writer brings his or her most feverish ideas and commitments to it. Love stories, when not set against a political backdrop, all have a way of being the same unless there is a strong subjectivity to make them special.

Kristin McCloy, a young writer who lives in Los Angeles and grew up overseas, won praise in 1989 for her first novel, “Velocity,” a compelling story of an educated young woman locked into an obsessive sexual relationship with an inarticulate biker. It is her slow fascination with the man’s sexuality and her single-mindedness about him that stitch the book together and give it its trademark.

In her second novel, McCloy works a more ambitious, detailed plot, but “Some Girls” does not have the same earthy bite as “Velocity.” This novel, which feels less unified than her first, tells the story of 23-year-old Claire Stearn, who has left her hometown, a family still suffering from an old divorce, and a sullen, hickish boyfriend for New York. Drawn into friendship with her neighbor, Jade, she must decide whether to return to familiar Alamogordo, or delve into unknown, uncertain territory with Jade, as a romance ensues.

McCloy’s prose style, with its fragmentary phrases and sentences fused together by commas, has a quiet, coursing internal voice.

“Some Girls” is full of salty, steamy, foody descriptions of New York’s Chinatown and tiny candle-lighted West Village restaurants, of bracing Atlantic weather at Jones Beach, of a trip to an emerald cove in Mexico.

Yet in spite of these strong points of favor, “Some Girls,” overall, is unconvincing fiction, uncomplicated enough to be a formula youth novel, albeit with sexual themes thrown in. A blueprint for a sweetly sappy screenplay, with its numerous locales and rapid sequences of scenes, the book attempts to revamp the small-town-kid-comes-to-the-big-city with lesbian exoticism, but regrettably, the reader does not feel the characters and their concerns so much as merely watch them pass by on the page.

The anarchic excitement of New York seen through a newcomer’s eyes, a major part of this narrative, is frequently flat, with its sketches of staple New Yorkers drawn in almost embarrassing cliches--the pidgin of cab drivers and shopkeepers is rendered impetuously, gracelessly, and fails to convey the quirky energy that real people have.

Neither is Jade, the friend who becomes a lover, portrayed very convincingly. McCloy wants to make her an unfathomably mysterious and sultry, worldly, rarefied creature who works a shady job and maintains a constant elegance before Claire’s admiring eyes. But who is really like this? The book offers little in the way of grounding Jade, or other characters, in any sort of depthful emotional rubric, though in a novel of this sort, that is what we would expect.

And while Jade is also hardened and disillusioned, her intense, immediate attachment to the clean-cut Claire is ill-explained. It’s hard to believe that someone with Jade’s sophistication would enter a love affair with the ingenue Claire without having some distance on the situation.

Perhaps the explanation lies in the statement that Jade makes to Claire while the two are high on peyote: “I’ve known you for eons. . . . I knew when I met you that we had a past. . . . People find each other, they pick up where they left off. . . .”

As the novel goes on, the feel of formula fiction waxes, and Claire’s naivete becomes just too silly to swallow. She interviews for a job with an attorney, Sam, who is characterized in terms of his nice sweaters, warm handshake and paternal concern. His office is “warm, like a room in somebody’s house, the walls lined with books. . . .”

Just like in the movies, Sam offers her the job on the spot, favoring her over the other jealous secretaries, and ludicrously, at the end of her first day of work, he requests that she be his paralegal on a civil lawsuit.

One gets the feeling that these scenes appear only to fill pages, to satisfy the author’s notion of what a plot should include. It isn’t that McCloy doesn’t have what it takes, for this book contains many fruitful scenes, and some especially sharp dialogue. Indeed, she seems to have a talent for conveying the pain of alcohol-soaked domestic rifts without being melodramatic--this is clear in both “Velocity” and “Some Girls.”

In vivid moments in the novel, McCloy seems truest to herself as a fiction writer, describing events in a felt, internal manner rather than laying out scenes for the sake of a plot, which commandeers the narrative. Her prose in itself is satisfying, and with it McCloy accomplishes much, but ultimately, “Some Girls” is not unique enough to make its urban love story worthwhile.