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a by Andy Warhol. 451 pages. Grove. $10.

When Andy Warhol sent an impostor to represent him on a lecture tour eleven months ago, he was offering the public another medium of pop art. The deception was not essentially different from producing soup cans and Brillo boxes in wood and paint. Pop art is premised, after all, on the belief that the surfaces of things are what really matter, or that, as Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray: "The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

Warhol has implemented the notion not only through painting and constructions, but by making plotless, purposely boring films like Empire, an eight-hour lenticular contemplation of the Empire State Building. Such creations can be viewed as a form of extremely arch satire, although they also encourage the viewer to experience familiar objects in fresh ways.

Sugar Plum Fairy, a is Warhol's first attempt to turn a trade book into a pop artifact. Described as his first novel, it is a package whose surface looks pretty much like any other book--in the same way that one of his Brillo boxes resembles a Brillo box on a grocery shelf. The contents, however, turn out to be an unedited transcript of 24 hours worth of drug-induced schizophrenic chatter tape-recorded by Warhol while following his friends around.

The copy on the jacket offers the guidance that a relates a day in the life of Ondine, one of the exotics who lounge in Warhol's Velvet Underground. There is the added information that the day begins with Ondine ingesting a quantity of amphetamine, ends 24 hours later "in an orgy of exhausted confusion."

Surrounding Ondine, like an eccentric's collection of stray cats, are people with some interesting names: Rotten Rita, the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Duchess, Billy Name, Irving du Ball, Paul Paul, Taxine, Moxanne and Ingrid Superstar. What they are actually doing, as opposed to what they are saying, is difficult to fathom from the transcript of the tape. The jacket blurb again is helpful: "The Duchess, who has stolen 3,000 pills and a blood-pressure machine, is in the hospital; Ondine dresses in drag for an evening at the 'teenage whore house'; Taxine confesses to Ondine why she must hang out with Andy; the Duchess escapes from the hospital; Andy is analyzed in a hostile face-to-face confrontation with an admirer; Irving du Ball puts everyone down."

In the Mind's Ear. Such explanations, so necessary to the conception of a novel as story, in fact lessen the impact of a as an object of pop art. In good pop art, the content should be so obvious and blatant that accompanying descriptions are unnecessary. There should be no question of thinking, only of feeling, in much the same way that one senses the flickering of television images or campfire flames. In a, what small sensual pleasure might have been offered in allowing the eye and the mind's ear to skid passively over the letters and words is reduced by the book's arbitrarily changing typography. The continuous flow of conversation that can be experienced by listening to a tape is fragmented in print by paragraphs, arbitrary variations in column width and distracting initials used to identify the speakers.

According to his editor, Warhol originally wanted the text to run unbroken by paragraphs or speaker identification but had to compromise with the forces of coherence. Had Warhol refused to give in, perhaps a would have succeeded in doing what his soup cans and boring film epics do so well--dull the mind into new awareness.

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