LESSING'S THEATRICAL TALE OF LOVE'S MANY STAGES : IT'S MEANT TO BE MAGICAL, BUT SHE'S NO GARCIA MARQUEZ.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York times

Title: ``Love, Again''

Author: Doris Lessing 

Data: 352 pages, HarperCollins; $24

Our rating: Two Stars

The task Doris Lessing has set herself in ``Love, Again'' is a difficult one: She has set out, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in ``Love in the Time of Cholera,'' to create an anatomy of love, to make an inventory of love in all its forms: young love, old love, lustful love, platonic love, love as an affliction and love as a hedge against mortality and despair.

The results, however, have none of the magic of Garcia Marquez's luminous novel, in large part because the story Lessing has chosen to relate in ``Love, Again'' is unbelievable, inadvertently comical and clumsily rendered. Lessing asks us to believe that a 65-year-old woman not only falls into a state of longing and lust, but that a perhaps magical power causes her to become the love object of several younger men, including a 40-year-old movie star, a 35-year-old director and a 26-year-old stud.

So, who is this sexagenarian sex kitten?

Lessing's typically omniscient narrator tells us that Sarah Durham is a founding member of a small London theater called the Green Bird. Her husband died when she was in her mid-30s; her two children are grown and living far away. As a young woman, we're told, Sarah had more than her share of boyfriends, but for the last 20 years has lived a quiet life devoid of the upheavals of romance. Everyone thinks of her as ``sensible'' Sarah.

All this abruptly changes, however, when Sarah begins work on a new play about the tragic life of a beautiful quadroon named Julie Vairon, who moved to France in the 1880s, fell in love twice, was abandoned twice and eventually committed suicide. As Sarah embarks on a new production of ``Julie Vairon'' in France, her own love life, eerily, starts to mirror Julie's.

Sarah develops an intense friendship with her co-author, Stephen Ellington-Smith, a wealthy patron of the arts, who happens to be desperately in love with the long-dead Julie.

She develops a terrible crush on the beautiful young man, Bill Collins, who plays one of Julie's lovers. She learns that the play's other male lead, Andrew Stead, is desperate to go to bed with her. And she falls passionately in love with the play's director, Henry Bisley, who reciprocates her feelings but is reluctant to cheat on his wife.

Such improbable developments, Lessing's narrator suggests, may be a result of Julie Vairon's strange, witchlike powers: From beyond the grave, she has infected everyone with the madness of love. Sarah herself marvels at her predicament and thinks: ``In a group of chimps, the senior female is sexually very popular.''

Lessing's prose does nothing to make Sarah's entanglements more convincing. Gone is the wonderful psychological nuance displayed in ``The Golden Notebook'' and the Martha Quest novels. In its place are characters who sound like walking volumes of ``Bartlett's Quotations,'' trading allusions to Proust, Goethe, Stendhal, Shakespeare and Browning in place of conversation. What's more, Lessing describes these characters in embarrassing romance-novel cliches.

Sarah, we're told, feels her body ``bursting into flame'' when she thinks of Bill: ``Her body had filled at once with a most horrible desire. A reckless desire.'' When she sees Bill with a younger woman, ``pain sliced through her'': ``Knives had nothing on this: red-hot skewers were more like it, or waves of fire.''

``She was dissolved in longing,'' Lessing writes. ``She could not remember ever feeling the rage of want that possessed her now. Surely never in her times of being in love had she felt this absolute, this peremptory need, an emptiness that hollowed out her body, as if life itself was being withheld from her.''

Lessing's penchant for writing about love in these panting, melodramatic terms has the effect of making her characters seem ridiculously self-pitying and self-absorbed. Sarah babbles on about spending ``a season in hell''; she looks at her lovelorn friend Stephen and thinks, ``This is the grief you see on the faces of survivors of catastrophes, staring back at you from the television screens.''

Of course, Lessing's heroines have always tended to define themselves - or discover their identity - through their own problems and the problems of people they care for, and Sarah is no exception. Her misadventures in love at the age of 65 propel her into a re-examination of her life and her desires.

In earlier Lessing novels, such inventories of a heroine's self were rendered in meticulous emotional detail, and they were used as a kind of commentary on the society in which that heroine lived. For some reason, this does not happen in ``Love, Again,'' and as a result the novel feels perfunctory and contrived, as well as implausible in the extreme.

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Photo: Doris Lessing ponders the timelessness of love and b eauty in her new novel, ``Love, Again.''