MADCAP LIFE RIFE IN `WIFE'.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: ``John's Wife''

Author: Robert Coover 

Data: 428 pages. Simon & Schuster; $24

Our rating: Four Stars

``Once, there was a man named John,'' begins Robert Coover's remarkable, disturbing new novel, ``John's Wife,'' which couldn't be farther from the fairy tale this opening sentence makes it sound like.

``John had money, family, power, good health, high regard, many friends,'' the narrative continues. ``A fortunate man, John. He was a builder by trade: where he walked, the earth changed, because he wished it so, and, like as not, his wishes all came true.''

In short, John is Coover's portrait of a quintessential American businessman, the main mover and shaker in a ``quiet prairie town'' that has little going for it beyond John's grit, hustle and connections.

And, as Coover's densely detailed, madcap narrative shortly reveals, John's success often depends on his ruthlessness.

When Veronica, one of his many lovers, tells him she is pregnant, he insists she get an abortion. When Marie-Claire, another lover, commits suicide, John, although he knows he has ``had a part in it,'' feels little more than ``a vague sense of relief.''

In one of the complex story's central developments, he gets wind of a conspiracy to trick him out of his business and, in retaliation, more or less destroys certain members of his family.

So, many of the town's citizens resent and even hate John, and knowing they can't get at him, they fixate on his wife, who remains nameless in the narrative.

Floyd, who manages John's Main Street hardware business, covets John's wife. Gordon, the town's photographer, longs ``to do a complete study of her, in all her public and private aspects.'' Ellsworth, the editor of the town's newspaper, sublimates John's wife into the heroine of a novel he is writing, ``The Artist and His Model.'' Kevin, the country club's golf pro, stands too close behind her when teaching her how to swing.

At first, the proliferation of townspeople in ``John's Wife'' is mind-numbing, as the narrative throws one name after another at the reader until there are some 50 different characters to keep track of. But then gradually, almost eerily, as the narrative keeps circling back and digging deeper, you begin to remember their stories as vividly as your own past.

`` `Memory is all we have to keep time from taking everything away from us,' '' one character writes in Ellsworth's newspaper, ``and not only did most townsfolk agree with her, but many had that column clipped and pinned up somewhere or tucked in a cookbook or the Bible so they wouldn't forget it.''

But halfway through the novel, their bad dreams begin to invade their memories, and as a result, their sense of reality betrays them.

Gordon, the photographer, takes a series of pictures of John's wife, which when developed turn out to be pornographic studies of his own wife, Pauline. Pauline herself, suddenly ravenous, begins to grow enormous, like Alice in Wonderland.

Veronica, who aborted her baby for John, finds the fetus has returned to demand her love. He slithers around like Popeye's Sweetpea, smokes cigars and shoots the lights out in a tavern. Ellsworth, the newspaper editor, becomes obsessed with his novel, but can't write because a character simply known as ``the Stalker'' is threatening his model.

Chaos descends. Characters murder and lust for one another. The action grows cartoonishly violent and unreal.

Occasionally funny, more often as anarchically nihilistic as a dirty joke, what Coover is up to in ``John's Wife'' echoes the more extreme hallucinogenic action of his earlier novels.

Here you sense that he has compromised his insistence that post-modern fiction completely reinvent reality, and that he is even willing to acknowledge some tiny portion of tradition.

Still, only one character escapes Coover's nightmare of history, and that is John's wife herself, whose chief quality is ``a thereness that was not there.''

This description of her continues, ``Coveted object, elusive mystery, beloved ideal, hated rival, princess, saint, or social asset, John's wife elicited opinions and emotions as varied and numerous as the townsfolk themselves, her unknowability being finally all they could agree upon.''

And whether she is seen as Goethe's Eternal Feminine, the Virgin Mary or Thomas Pynchon's V, her elusiveness is finally made the butt of a crude joke, as the town's retired police chief studies one of Gordon's photographs double-exposing Pauline's pubic area and the face of John's wife. ``What? He peered closer. No. Nothing more. A photographic flaw perhaps. No, wait! There, up by the appendectomy scar: a gaze - THAT gaze! He gasped and fell to his knees, felt a tingling on the back of his neck. It was she! The Virgin! A miracle!''

Much closer to the hard philosophical core of Coover's novel is the suicide note of a cancer-stricken wife to her husband, Oxford, the town druggist:

``Why we turn against reason, Oxford, is because it tells us we can never have the one deathless thing we most desire and that all our lesser loves must end in sorrow. It's almost unreasonable to be reasonable. I love you, Oxford, but can express this now only by inflicting grief upon you, which, alas, I find I would do with pleasure. And so I deny my love and mourn only myself. My own grief satisfies me and, as you are no longer loved - indeed, you no longer even exist for me - you are freed from all mournful thought of me, who certainly does not exist, unless grieving gives you joy.''

If it is possible anywhere to grieve with joy, then Coover's cheerfully psychotic world is the place for it.

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Photo: Robert Coover pulls out all the stops in his narrati ve for ``John's Wife.''