BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Magical Realism in Small Town America : JOHN’S WIFE by Robert Coover Simon & Schuster $24, 448 pages

Reading Robert Coover’s new novel about lewd, magical and mysterious happenings in a generic American small town is like being sucked down into a whirlpool.

Characters flash by--first just a name, mentioned casually; then, in succeeding revolutions and revelations, a fuller and fuller portrait; then views of that character through the eyes of other characters; then actions that seem out of character, as we understood him or her. Did we miss something? we wonder. Never mind; he or she will come spinning our way again.

It’s the same with events. “John’s Wife” at first seems to be plotless, but only because the narrative doesn’t follow chronology or cause and effect but jumps in a kind of free association. We get a piece of an event, then another piece, then its connection to another event, and so on, assembling the story as we go.

John--no last names here--is the mover and shaker in town. He’s a winner in every field: business, sports, sex--”a man whose considerable resources matched his considerable desires. A fortunate man, John,” the author notes from his own godlike perch. “He was a builder by trade: Where he walked, the earth changed, because he wished it so.”

John is admired, sometimes resented, but his wife is loved. Gordon the town photographer, who seeks to freeze life’s flux into art with each click of his shutter; Ellsworth the newspaperman, who seeks to shape that flux into stories; Otis the cop; Lenny the preacher; Alf the doctor; Stu, the Ford dealer; Maynard, John’s envious cousin--all of them love John’s wife, who has no other name, whose beauty and virtue define only a curious absence, as if the town is a doughnut and she is the hole; who sometimes, when people glance around at her too quickly, isn’t there.

Women love her too. Daphne, drunken Stu’s drunken wife, talks to her on the phone whether John’s wife answers or not. Marge, the town feminist, fights John’s developments partly because he is unfaithful to his wife. Other women seem bewitched by the general spell John’s wife casts over the town. Veronica, Maynard’s wife, believes that the child of John’s she aborted in college is following her, trailing slime. Beatrice, the preacher’s ex-hippie wife, gives birth to another couple’s missing teenage son.

Eventually, the novel--on one level a bawdy and deadly satire of good-ol’-boy mores; on another level a complex portrait of the townspeople, rich and poor, young and old, happy and miserable; on still another, a philosophical inquiry into the relationship between life and art--revolves around two events, one in the past, one in the present.

The night before John’s wedding, he and his fraternity brothers, now his employees, held a stag party at which they all had sex with Pauline, a 14-year-old from the wrong side of the tracks, now the photographer’s wife. This event, part of the town’s unrecorded history--its unconscious--carries darker and darker implications for those involved, the more we learn of it.

Coover (“The Origin of the Brunists,” “The Public Burning”) makes the present event a 17-ring circus. There’s a murder, an auto accident, a parade, a barbecue, a storm, a kidnapping, a suicide, assorted other mayhem, Pauline’s growth to enormous size and her shooting and burning by a posse of vigilantes--the outbreak of the unconscious and its violent suppression by the forces of order.

Is it all a bit too much? Too much raunch, too many plots with too many twists in them? Does the magical realism that draws us deeply into the whirlpool sometimes turn centrifugal and spit us out, less moved than exhausted? No doubt. Still, Coover’s skills are formidable, and this story of the power of flux to disrupt memory, community and desire--except for John, who drives flux as if it were his Porsche or his plane, and John’s wife, who somehow transcends it--has to be one of the year’s most ambitious novels, and one of its funniest.