`STELLA': WAITING TO INHALE LIFE'S SWEETNESS.

Byline: Margaria Fichtner Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

You would think that by now, Stella Payne would be exhaling just fine.

At 42, the narrator of Terry McMillan's sassy new blockbuster is a $200,000-plus stocks analyst and single mother who faces life buoyed by two master's degrees and a $50-an-hour personal trainer. Stella owns a BMW, a Land Cruiser, a large house with pool and sauna in an upscale neighborhood near San Francisco and a vacation retreat in Lake Tahoe. She also holds a fat personal investments portfolio, is a partner in a handful of fast-food businesses and does not think twice about dropping $1,000 a pop at Costco or Home Depot. Stella has come a long, long way from the Chicago projects, and life, she admits with what strikes us as almost frightening understatement, is ``mundane redundant predictable but good.''

And about to get better. Stella's cute 11-year-old son Quincy has just left for Colorado to visit his father, thereby giving his overworked, overcommitted mom the chance to savor some well-deserved private time:

``Thank God it's Saturday. And thank God it's summertime. School's out. No more three-day-a-week Little League practice (rain or shine) or those long-ass games. No week-on/week-off revolving carpooling and forgetting it's my week and being afraid to call the parents of the abandoned children who are all standing in the rain for an hour after I forgot them because they are all - including my own son - too dumb to call somebody else. And thank the Lord there's nowhere I have to be: no can't-wait portfolios to review and I don't have to pay attention to any of the four computers in my office, I mean I can actually be off-line for a change and I have no meetings, no planes to catch, nada.''

Time ``to do some make-Stella-feel-good stuff,'' to take a load off, downshift, decompress, get the windows washed, cook low-fat meals, catch up with long-neglected friends and relatives, even read some books. Well, good luck.

In creating Stella, McMillan has compressed in one slim, jittery package all the sexy smarts and quirks she doled out among Savannah Jackson, Bernadine Harris, Robin Stokes and Gloria Matthews, the heroines of ``Waiting to Exhale,'' her 1992 boffo best-selling female African-American buddy book. Stella is a quintessential '90s woman, ambitious, manic, loving, loyal and profane. She is, in her own proud words, ``Mrs. F------ Perfect Person Personified.'' Though she survived the risky recreational sex and drugs of the '70s and early '80s with her health, libido and sanity intact, she now has accumulated enough neuroses for a lifetime membership in ``that forty-and-over club for Emotional Subversives in Denial About Everything.'' Do we always like Stella? No. Does she have our attention? You bet.

Although Quincy's father was a bore, and ``living with him was like living in a museum. It was drafty, full of vast open spaces and slippery floors,'' divorce has left Stella limp and numb. Marriage may be a dead-end proposition (``I'm not doing it again''), but once it is over, there is a vacuum nothing else can fill. ``A person can be on your last nerve, drive you to drink,'' Stella declares, ``but you still kind of miss their sorry ass after they're gone is what I found out.'' She has a number to call for noncommittal sex, but ``most of the time my life is not fun.''

At this point, we wanted to brew Stella a nice cup of tea, hand her that brochure from the community school about its new courses (``The Trombone in Literature,'' ``Balanchine and Belloc,'' ``Bas Relief Made Easy'') and tell her to sign up for something and get a grip. But McMillan clearly has other ideas.

Quincy barely has scooted out the door when Stella flicks on her 55-inch TV and is snared by an ad for Jamaica. Before we can blink, she acquires a new hip hairstyle, packs her bags and checks into a nice hotel in Negril where her room has ``a lovely balcony with ... big giant rocks and crashing waves right below like in the movies.''

Not incidentally, the hotel also has Winston Shakespeare, an apprentice chef with whom Stella suddenly and quite inexplicably falls in love. Winston is tall and good-looking and - in a switch from the cloddish guys of ``Waiting to Exhale'' - an honest, considerate companion and sweet, gentle lover. He also is fairly poor by U.S. standards and less than half Stella's age, which leads to a lot of predictable, anxious hand-wringing.

Nonetheless, Winston makes Stella feel ``like I've been doing lines of coke like I've just smoked a good joint had a few drinks run a ten K had a deep tissue massage skied fifty miles per hour down KT-22 at Squaw Valley had a double espresso and a Xanax all at the same time. How's that?''

Plot has never been McMillan's strength, and what passes for it in ``How Stella Got Her Groove Back'' mainly revolves around the Keystone Kops jumps and starts of the lovers' affair - its miscues, canceled dates, crossed wires, undelivered telephone messages. When Winston is hired by another hotel and disappears temporarily, Stella throws herself into a frenzy of volleyball, horseback riding and parasailing, drowns her loneliness in a nauseating string of virgin pina coladas and shrugs off the unwelcome attentions of one man only to succumb to a brief, abortive fling with a handsome developer from Atlanta. It is hard to know precisely what to think of all this. ``Romeo and Juliet'' meets ``Porgy and Bess'' meets ``Harold and Maude.'' Sort of.

Interposed amid the ebb and flow of Stella and Winston's love, McMillan plants some diverting travelogue scenes of Jamaican sunsets, shantytowns and cliff divers; offers an opinion of Miami's airport (``It is like a zoo''); and delivers a long screed on female inequality (``I mean, why doesn't Mary get more play, because Jesus is always simply referred to as like the son of God, well, what about Mom and I mean let's get real ... '').

We are less charmed by Stella's relentlessly unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness narrative. After one particularly grueling sentence that lumbered on for almost 300 words, we were noticeably irritated and lightheaded.

Still, McMillan's fans will rejoice in the book's funky, romantic exuberance. Viking has committed to an astonishing 800,000-copy first printing, which confirms McMillan's standing as a leading literary mouthpiece for the African-American middle- and upper-middle class. And what could be more groovy than that?

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Photo: (1--2) Like the characters in ``Waiting to Exhale ,'' the heroine of Terry McMillan's new novel, ``How Stella Got Her Groove Back,'' is smart, sexy, savvy - and embroiled in man troubles.