BOOK REVIEW : L’Engle Hero Harps on King David : CERTAIN WOMEN, <i> By Madeleine L’Engle,</i> Farrar Straus Giroux, $21; 352 pages

This review calls for a certain amount of critical disclosure: I don’t know Madeleine L’Engle, but she has written my second-favorite novel, “The Small Rain,” and my second-least-favorite novel, “The Severed Wasp,” one of only two books that I’ve ever thrown across the room. Certainly, in the objective world, L’Engle is a female monument, a writer of classics for both children and adults, a woman who pursues her fictional path whether it follows the general trend or style or not. She commands respect and attention.

But if you’re looking for an amusing, entertaining, lively, thrilling narrative, with characters so alive that they leap at you off the page, “Certain Women” is not the novel for you. This is novel-as-meditation, novel-as-exegesis.

L’Engle takes as her text the story of King David, Old Testament David, who played the harp for Saul to relieve him of his depressions, who became fast friends with Saul’s son Jonathan, who slew the mighty Goliath with a stone from his slingshot. King David, who had eight wives and a zillion concubines. David, who saw Bathsheba bathing, took her for his own and sent her husband up to the front lines of a local war to be killed so that he might make Bathsheba his last wife.

Also, we remember that David’s son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar. Also, that David’s favorite son Absolom died, and David mourned him mightily. We have to know all this, as readers, because it makes up half the narrative line of “Certain Women.”

In modern times--actually, the ‘60s--David Wheaton, famous star of the Broadway stage, likens himself to his Old Testament namesake: “I see Death as somewhat like Goliath,” he remarks on Page 1, “but I am not allowed even a slingshot as I go to meet him.”

L’Engle, in her examination of death, has created an allegorical modern man who is artistically talented, larger than life and, like King David of old, has married a few more times than might be considered prudent. (But then, what celebrity hasn’t?) David Wheaton has had nine wives: Meredith, Abby, Myrlo, Marical, Harriett, Elizabeth, Edith, Sophie and finally Alice.

From these nine wives spring 11 children, and David’s genius--and through the generosity of Abby, Marical, Sophie and Alice--he is able to keep his own overextended family together. This is a high New York cultural outfit: Everyone here is in the theater, or a producer, or dances, or sings, or practices medicine or law. There’s not a bum in the bunch. But there is a nasty half-brother who’s going to rape Emma, just as Amnon violated Tamar.

Emma, the heroine of this tale, finds herself on a small yacht, meandering from island to island in the Pacific Northwest with her father, who is dying, and his last wife Alice, who conveniently practices medicine. (There would have been hell to pay if he’d picked Harriett, the prima ballerina, as wife No. 9.) What’s left of his family drops by the yacht to pay their last respects.

Emma, who has just left her playwright husband Nik, obsessively remembers earlier days when she’d met her spouse and he--with mixed motives--had been working on a fairly bad play about King David, in hopes that the many-married David Wheaton would star in it and make everybody’s reputation.

Nik, as a character, gets the short end of the novelistic stick here. He has one topic of conversation: King David. David in the morning, David at night, David eating sandwiches, David in the marriage bed. The fictional question--even in this kind of allegorical novel--has to be: What on earth does Emma see in Nik? Why doesn’t she run screaming from him on the first date? Wouldn’t you, if someone took Solomon, or Abraham, and talked about him nonstop, morning, noon and night for close to 20 years?

But this is novel-as-exegesis. L’Engle wants to examine problems from the Old Testament in a modern text. She wants to look at love and war and marriage and divorce--and death--within a biblical framework. I would imagine she is advising us--as modern agnostics perhaps--not to be too hasty in separating ourselves from the Judeo-Christian ethic that informs so many of our attitudes and opinions.

An interesting question: How can Doris Lessing turn toward science fiction and elicit comparatively little critical flack and Madeleine L’Engle turn to traditional religion and provoke such a different response?