`BEAR' LAYS PUBLISHING BIZ BARE.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: ``The Bear Went Over the Mountain''

Author: William Kotzwinkle 

Data: 306 pages. Doubleday; $22.50

Our rating: Three Stars

Can book publishing still be satirized? Is it possible to exaggerate an industry in which public figures cash in on their own improprieties; in which reports lately have circulated of a touring author having phone sex with his wife while being driven to an appointment, or in which a sentence in a recent best-selling novel reads, ``Standing in his plaid shirt and loafers, she thought how out of place he looked, affectionately''?

Whether or not such a business has now become proof to ridicule, William Kotzwinkle takes an amusing swat at it in his latest novel, ``The Bear Went Over the Mountain,'' although his fable sounds almost familiar at first.

When Arthur Bramhall, a professor of American literature at the University of Maine, moves to the country for his sabbatical and tries to buy his freedom by copying a best seller, ``Don't, Drummond,'' he feels justly punished by a fire that destroys his farmhouse and his manuscript with it.

So he starts over and writes an honest book, ``Destiny and Desire,'' with ``lots of sex, but it had a connection to the ancient moods of the forests, to crow songs and fox cries and the crackling of a fire in the hearth.'' To protect it from fire, he puts the manuscript in a briefcase and hides it under the boughs of an old spruce.

But a bear that sees him do this retrieves the briefcase, reads the manuscript and finds that it ``isn't bad at all.'' The bear steals clothes from a store (``His taste was deplorable but he was only a bear''); learns to walk upright with the briefcase in his paw; invents a pen name, Hal Jam, and signs it on the title page, and delivers it to a literary agent in New York. In no time, ``Desire and Destiny'' becomes the No. 1 best seller and Hal Jam the reincarnation of Ernest Hemingway, ``the man of action who can also tell a love story.''

Much of Kotzwinkle's kidding of the book business will seem mild in the context of reality. Except for the agent and Hal's editor at Cavendish Press, nobody bothers to read ``Desire and Destiny.''

Bettina Quint, Cavendish's publicity director, concludes from a three-paragraph synopsis that Hal Jam is ``the find of the year - a writer who could move a woman to tears of compassion for herself.''

Similarly twitted are the satellites of the book business. Zou Zou Sharr, a movie agent, believes that ``in showbiz, books were always a question mark, because books were just books, but buzz you could trust.'' Television and radio hosts will do anything to draw attention to their shows. The right-wing Rev. Norbert Sinkler wants Hal to visit him at Godland and endorse his candidacy for the presidency, which Hal is eager to do, thinking a candidacy might be something to eat ``in a creamy sauce with tender little peas floating in it.''

Luckily for the real humor of ``The Bear Went Over the Mountain,'' Kotzwinkle, best known for his novelization of the movie ``ET,'' indulges his comic sense of quirkiness, particularly in creating the character of Hal Jam, the bear. Hal wants badly to become a person, especially when he discovers how effectively humans have hoarded the good things in life, like pies and honey.

But he is continually distracted by his animal nature: his appetite, his sense of smell, his territoriality, his need to fish and hunt.

So Hal manages a dumb sort of honesty, which the people he meets interpret as wise or canny. ``Hal Jam's warm and sincere,'' says the Rev. Sinkler.

The gag is an old one, most famously exploited, in recent memory, by Jerzy Kosinski in his novel ``Being There.''

But Hal makes you laugh out loud and root for his success.