A Tale of Desperation : When Hollywood wanna-bes and has-beens clash : SKYLA, <i> By Benjamin Manaster (Branden Publishing: $21.95; 244 pp.)</i>

Warren Kummer is a familiar Hollywood antihero, a once promising, never-was screenwriter-director hyphenate loser. Kummer, no longer a comer, is depressed.

As “Skyla” begins, Kummer turns on his stove and thrusts his head inside the oven. He thinks, not of Sylvia Plath, but of “cooking flameless, the way they did in Auschwitz and Treblinka.”

Still on the first page, Kummer hears his ringing phone and pulls his head out of the oven for that clearly unexpected and desperately needed last grasp at fame and fortune.

“And like one of Pavlov’s dogs, frothing at the mouth, he lurched from the oven, staggered across the kitchen floor and picked up just before the answering machine.”

The image of a show-business wanna-be ripping his head out of the oven to answer his phone could actually harbinger a proper Hollywood story, resonating with reality. As Woody Allen once observed, “It’s worse than dog eat dog, it’s dog doesn’t return dog’s phone calls.”

Kummer’s call does indeed hold the promise of promise. An old producer friend wants him to rework the story of Oedipus into a woman’s picture, “Jocasta.” Kummer can direct. He just needs to help hustle up the financing and a female star.

This first novel by Benjamin Manaster opens smart and volleys plenty of nasty chuckles. Kummer’s young sons, Syd and Irv, have old Hollywood mogul monikers. And in a nod to the Industry’s subtle reverse snobbism, Kummer lunches with an Oscar-winning cinematographer and notes that the man “had acquired an Oklahoma accent, to cover up his preppy past perhaps.”

Kummer is dispatched to Europe, where he attempts to bag the “over the hill” but still bankable sex goddess Skyla Conte.

Conte agrees to do the movie but pulls out due to “a possible tumor” after hearing that the cinematographer bailed out. Then she’s back, but her husband, the producer with the money, wants a new director, who wants a new writer, who quits, as Conte quits again, beckoning Kummer, who has meanwhile been chasing a succession of other actresses.

By this point, Manaster’s acerbic witticisms have begun to lose their way in a flaccid confluence of events and caricatures that are not adding up to a story. Each potential actress is arbitrarily driven to assault the complacent and dispassionate Kummer with her predatory bloated (or emaciated) sex-starved body. On the other hand, his wife, Becca, is inexplicably bereft of sexuality altogether.

Manaster’s literary riffs on the female anatomy are a morbidly unerotic meld of the scatological, the clinical and the gross. The sex scenes read like car wrecks.

“Jolted by her ungainly movements, smothered by her gaseous emissions, he was preparing to accept his fate when a flash flood of light illumined the cloacal night. Trembling apoplectic, she turned rigid all of a sudden and released her torment on him. Portent of some punishment as yet unspecified, one shock wave followed upon another until his very bones began to rattle; and slipping from her lofty thighs at last, he lay limp upon the sheets, like a newborn marsupial, fetid and forlorn, prostrate from exhaustion.”

Perhaps the fatal handicap “Skyla” suffers is its apparent lack of editing. If an editor was on the job here, he/she must have been comatose. The redundancies and misspellings are profuse: Skyla smokes Galois (sic) cigarettes; a dope dealer has a Motley Crew (sic) poster; a London hotel room, a Queen Ann (sic) desk. The venerable Canter’s delicatessen is Cantor’s. (An unintentional joke, perhaps?) Conte’s breasts are often “pendulous” and she never eats; she always “stuffs” her mouth with whatever.

These gaffes could be overlooked if the center held, but (with apologies to Gertrude Stein) there is no center at the center. Each contrivance becomes increasingly tedious. Our interest, finally our amusement, falters and dies.

One can only imagine how Manaster’s clever wordplay and frequently lance-like insight might have been shaped to pass muster with strong editorial participation.

As it is, we must report that the sweet anticipation stirred by the deliciously bitter beginning of this novel simply curdles--this disappointed reader passed out cold four pages from the end.