The Giant Dwarf : THE DORK OF CORK, <i> By Chet Raymo (Warner Books: $18.95; 354 pp.)</i>

Frank Bois is a 43-inch dwarf from Cork, Ireland, whose first book, “Nightstalk,” has just been published by a major London house. The narrator of Chet Raymo’s novel, “The Dork of Cork,” Frank has been observing the night sky over Cork since the age of 6. Sensitive to the effect his physical appearance has on others, Frank has chosen to live primarily at night; he is accustomed to darkness and solitude. But in order to promote his newly published book--his publishers feel it is a serious and gorgeous piece of work, but are not resistant to the possibilities of marketing a 43-inch author--Frank is forced out into daylight and society.

Chet Raymo’s novel is a richly poetic book about beauty and destiny, at once compelling and complex. Raymo seems to have an equal gift for character, story, and language; an equal gift for the exterior and interior aspects of his tale. His first-person narrator is one of the book’s most persuasive and memorable creations.

Frank’s book is a sort of mirror-image version of Raymo’s book. “Nightstalk” is described as a look at the stars with some autobiography included; “The Dork of Cork” is autobiography with some stars included. It consists of pieces of “Nightstalk,” but--more interestingly--of those pieces of Frank’s life he chose to leave out of his book.

The fun in Raymo’s book comes from this book-within-a-book device. Are Raymo’s fictional women improbably beautiful, more fantasy than female, perfectly recognizable, even familiar, from other male fictions, but not very true to life? Are they in fact goddesses sure to annoy real women everywhere? Raymo has already lodged this complaint against himself, detailing it in the fictional reviews of the fictional book. He has also defended himself through his narrator. How is he supposed to know anything about women, Frank asks. Surely he may be excused for finding women as beautiful and remote as the stars.

But despite the device and the improbable title, Raymo’s book is more moving than amusing. He has created a painful and intimate look at a man who loves beauty, in a culture that worships beauty, who is not beautiful himself, but at 8 or 9 years old, had already seen “how long are the shadows that beauty casts.” It is a book full of beautiful language and sensitive to beautiful forms. The poetry of Yeats is quoted often, and Raymo turns his own considerable descriptive skills on the landscape and the northern sky and the narrator’s body. Frank was born with “ears like crushed cabbages”; in the Cork countryside, “moonlight compresses Dorkmiles and miles of scenery into painted rafts like stage sets”; the moon emerging after an eclipse is “an eyelash-thin sliver of radiance.”

Frank’s story stretches from his mother’s girlhood through his own 43rd year. He, himself, was born at the end of World War II. His mother, Bernadette, was a French stowaway on an American ship. His father, Frank says, was a crew-cut, khaki-American GI also on the ship, but he doesn’t know which, and neither does Bernadette. “All of them were beaux,” she assures him. “All of them were kind.” Twenty-four hours pregnant, Bernadette is caught and put ashore in Ireland.

Whatever his actual parentage, Frank identifies himself as belonging to the race of Caliban in a world that assumes a match between the outer and the inner man. His voice is intimate and self-revealing; the impression of intimacy is heightened when he often, in narrative, speaks directly to the people he knows. There is a paragraph for his female editor who has accused him of self-loathing and said it was the only unattractive thing about him; another for the girl Emma, whom he saw once emerging from her bath.

Until the publication of his book, Frank’s only connection with people is through Bernadette--the only men he knows are his mother’s lovers; the only women, his mother’s lover’s daughters. It is the outsider’s perspective, done with dazzling clarity and perception. Frank is an outsider in every way, yet it is his estrangement from the world of women, the race of Miranda, that hurts him most. Because there have been so few women in his life, he remembers each in painful detail--their careless kindnesses, their pointed cruelties. His mother is woven like a bright thread in and out of the entire novel, a distant and desirable woman whose faint and unreliable gift of prescience has brought her nothing but tragedy and left only a heritage of tragedy for her son.

I don’t wish to tip the ending, but my only criticisms of the book concern it. Much about it works. It is certainly a surprise; it is emotionally satisfying; it mirrors the ending of the fictional “Nightstalk” in a formally gratifying way. In fact, no one with a heart could wish for the book to end in any other place. And yet it is not absolutely persuasive. Once again, Raymo anticipates the criticism by including discussion of the ending of Frank’s book. Somewhere in the nighttime world of metafiction, the book with the ending we would believe in exists and makes possible the real book with the ending we wish for.