Bagatelle--Guinevere

So highly imaginative are the scenes in this engrossing fantasy-satire that they frequently take on a hallucinatory quality. Bogen (Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square) begins her clever novel-within-a-novel in 1976, as heroine Felice Rothman volunteers for a NASA mission to find life on the distant Planet X. After a space voyage of more than 1000 days, Felice successfully assimilates herself into the society on X, even learning to speak the aliens' language. When she returns, she asks Bogen to edit her account of the journey. Thus Bogen the writer becomes a character in her own fiction, distancing herself from Felice's narration; she is, she asserts, merely a go-between for a writer whose sanity she doubts. The dry, professorial interjections of Bogen the editor form a distinctive counterpoint to Felice's frequent colloquialisms (``What the hay''; ``oh wow'')-ironic earthiness from a space traveller. Through Felice's wanderings, Bogen (the writer) satirizes feminism, higher education, government, race relations and men. In one scene, aliens ``videotape'' Felice's dream, a sort of psychic rape. The novel's vivid, otherworldly descriptions-crimson water, pink sand-hold the reader rapt. Still, much of the prose is workaday, and many of the episodes are so similar they tend to blur together. Just as Felice becomes trapped underground in one labyrinthine civilization after another, the reader may feel trapped inside the repetitive plot. In a sparkling afterword, Bogen tweaks her readers one last time about the nature of reality and fantasy, fact and fiction. (Jan.)