The Virgin’s Nose? : All this magical realism, murder, art and religion . . . just for some creepy revenge : THE VIRGIN KNOWS, <i> By Christine Palamidessi Moore (A Wyatt Book for St. Martin’s Press: $22.95; 320 pp.)</i>

Christine Palamidessi Moore’s first book, “The Virgin Knows,” is being presented by the publishers and the author herself as a comic novel in the magical realist mode of Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Moore, unfortunately, lacks enough mastery over her material to have written such a book; flat, expository language and a lack of psychological acuity in particular wage war with such excellent intentions.

Although occasionally studded with idiomatic quirkiness (“I was the one who looked for hairs inside an egg,” declares narrator Alicia Barzini), Moore’s language is overwhelmingly discursive (“Since the day we were born, I had been dreaming my dream alongside Carlo’s. I wanted exactly what he had. It took me 36 years to accept that this was impossible and to create my own desires”). Combine such prose with a preposterous plot and you head straight to tedium.

A big-nosed, miserable virgin, Alicia lives in the small Italian town of Subaico with her awful old parents and spies telepathically on her twin brother Carlo, who is making his fortune in America. After the parents die, Carlo comes back for Alicia. She rebuffs him at first. He goes to the Vatican, arriving just in time to see the Pieta vandalized. He snatches up the virgin’s nose and, when he returns it the next day, enters into an under-explained alliance with the Benevolents, a group dedicated to restoring lost art treasures to Rome.

Then Carlo and Alicia (who has changed her mind) fly to Boston. There, Alicia is appalled by Carlo’s household, which consists of his girlfriend, Jassy; his business partner, Virginia; and Virginia’s boyfriend, Renato. Alicia sees Renato and Virginia having sex and is so outraged by it (although not by her own voyeurism), she takes the next plane back to Italy.

For the next six years, Alicia becomes an expert cardiac nurse, a miser and a recluse--she faints in a fruit store the one time she goes out in public. (You may well ask: Isn’t it a bit difficult to be a reclusive cardiac nurse? This is just one of many contradictions presented by the author.) The hated Jassy stops by while touring with an opera company and tells Alicia she is an unusual and remarkable woman.

The next thing you know, Alicia is inspecting her own genitals with a hand mirror: “Suddenly a light squeezed out of my hole. . . . ‘I’m your virginity,’ it said, taking a seat at my side. My virginity looked like an angel, but without wings.” Her virginity tells her to help Carlo, so when he calls for her, Alicia swings into action: She gets a clandestine nose job, converts her hoard of lire notes into gold pieces, which she licks and sticks to her breast in a Roman hotel room. Once Alicia gets to Boston, she’s kidnaped by some Benevolents who are mad that Virginia hasn’t completed a shipment of stolen art. From there, the plot branches out into murder, smuggling, simony, spiritualism and sex.

Action and consequence are so illogical in these pages, so subjugated to the author’s whim, that not much counts for anything. At one point, we’re told that Alicia’s ugly nose has become her most valuable asset; a few pages later, she has a nose job. She’s so shy, she faints in public, but a few pages later, she’s a wealthy, jet-setting family savior who stands up to thugs, becomes a murder investigator and a self-ordained, sacrament-administering priest.

So many of the author’s choices seem questionable, even for comic magical realism. The only thing that motivates characters in this book is the author’s whim, which is unexamined, contradictory and immune to the laws of cause and effect. Freshly home from being kidnaped, the first thing Alicia does is ogle Renato: “His hips swayed inside his corduroy trousers. His feet were bare and long-toed and similar in shape, I thought, to his penis.” (A five-toed penis?) A few pages later, Alicia realizes that Jassy has been brutally murdered, but never mind: Alicia wants to sightsee in Florence, kiss an Italian waiter, fantasize about being on center stage herself in the auditorium where the murder took place. Never mind, too, that the Benevolents hold guns on children, kill innocent women and sell indulgences, Alicia marries one anyway--and he’s a priest, to boot.

Moore seems to think she is writing of a woman’s miraculous transformation from repressed child to mature, self-sufficient adult. But she has not paid proper attention to the implications of her material. It is almost as if a scheming, unsavory, self-justifying character has taken hold of a naive, oblivious author. This is not the story of Alicia’s flowering; rather, it is the story--the fantasy, really--of her creepy triumph: The American women (Jassy and Virginia) are disposed of and a wealthy Alicia gets to move in as matriarch, presiding over the other women’s children and men, as well as her own child and husband.

At the very least, the novel needed another draft, if only to tighten the flabby plot and put some pressure on the language. As it is now, the gap between what the author thinks is going on in the book and what actually transpires between the covers is the difference between a comic, magical novel and several hundred pages of hokum.