When Life Becomes Art and Vice Versa : THE ORANGE CAT BISTRO by Nancy Linde; Kensington Books; $23.95, 264 pages

Claire is in a bit of a fix. A self-styled “plain Jane” New York schoolteacher, she’s barely finished celebrating her escape from a 13-year marriage to Aaron, a control freak psychiatrist, when she finds herself in bed with a real loser. Alec, a painter, has suckered her in with the gift of a teddy bear and a sweetness she can’t resist. But now he’ll pay attention to her only if she’s mean to him. With a sigh, she buys a dominatrix costume and demands that he buy her a giant stuffed animal every day for a week. “Yes, Mistress,” Alec quavers.

Pretty weird stuff. Actually, it’s even weirder. Alec is a character in a novel Claire is writing on the after-effects of divorce. She explores the problems of self-esteem, getting in touch with your anger, learning independence and dating in the age of AIDS. It’s all very serious, except that Claire can’t resist stepping into the book and chatting with her characters--about their problems, art, love and the sometimes stymied story line.

Oh, God, you may well think. Not another anxiety-laden postmodern opus about the blurred boundaries between life and art and the inability of art to portray life’s complexities. Well, yes and no. First of all, “The Orange Cat Bistro,” Linde’s first novel, is quite short and delightfully lighthearted about most of its potentially heavyweight questions.

Secondly, aside from the occasional lurch into self-helpdom and New Age cuteness--the ending is definitely on the yucky side--the novel’s more bizarre tendencies are balanced by the author’s honest approach to relationship matters and her ability to make gentle fun of all concerned.

The emotional center of the book is a Greenwich Village bistro. Claire has taken a room upstairs. Every day, after teaching school, she relaxes with a cafe au lait and brioche, enjoying her post-divorce freedom. A fat orange cat sleeps in a window full of geraniums and “Madame” perches behind the cash register, “stout in widow black,” the kind of woman who “eats men like French fries and buys a bigger girdle every year.”

In this nurturing atmosphere, Claire heals her soul and starts her book. Perhaps it’s just as well we hear little about Aaron, who ditched Claire for a floozy. It would have been one more stereotypical tale of divorce trauma overcome. Instead, Linde gives us an urban fairy tale.

The heroine of the novel within the novel is Nevada, Claire’s alter ego. She’s a pretty, slightly wacky, fragile-looking sculptor with large, competent hands. For the past 10 years Nevada has been working on a hollow granite sculpture she calls “the Thing.” It’s an alternative world, the sculptural equivalent of returning to the womb. It’s also a metaphor for that inner space where art is created, for the power of art to change your life.

It’s not long before Claire and Nevada--author and creation--become soul sisters, administering to each other’s wounded psyches as they make banana bread together in the Orange Cat Bistro’s kitchen. Meanwhile Claire is sinking deeper into date hell, but Nevada meets her prince, a nurturing opera singer called Nicholas, who helps her regain emotional strength--giving Claire the sense that real love is possible.

The book’s most important moment of enlightenment comes more grittily, when Claire is with Alec, who is more “Beast” than “Prince.” When Alec obediently brings her a stuffed gorilla, she realizes that coerced gift-giving doesn’t give her the same warm and fuzzy feeling as the more spontaneous sort.

She begins to have “that awful stuck feeling you get from doing something you don’t want to do in order to get love, the barely repressed fury, the continual message that you’re sending your body that your feelings don’t count, although everyone else’s warrant endless worship.”

It’s hard to find fault with a book that keeps you chuckling (and thinking), but there are moments when Linde pushes too hard for humor--too many one-liners, too many over-developed jokes. Still, this is a promising first novel that couples a strong intelligence with a wild imagination. It makes me want to go find that bistro.