Fans of A.S. Byatt's fiction can be divided into two groups: Those who cannot understand her novels and those who lie. Even her most popular work, the Booker Prize- winning "Possession," was demanding, and her previous novel, "The Biographer's Tale," was downright baffling.

Her latest, "A Whistling Woman," completes a tetralogy, meaning a fair number of us already feel intimidated. The series began 25 years ago with "The Virgin in the Garden," which introduced Frederica Potter, then a precocious teenager. Now, three novels later, Frederica has abandoned her university post - driven away by self-righteous and dimwitted undergraduates, no doubt the kind of lazy readers who would find A.S. Byatt's novels too arduous.

The British publisher claims that "A Whistling Woman" stands on its own, but I just wished it would stand still. This peripatetic story about the late 1960s is as fascinating, eclectic, and confusing as that psychedelic era.

The various strands of the plot wind around a body-mind conference being planned at a new university in Yorkshire. An infinitely patient vice chancellor hopes to inspire "a biological-cognitive Theory of Everything," while his vindictive New Age wife traipses around campus reading hippies' horoscopes. To ensure maximum academic and media attention, he's invited speakers from every possible discipline - even, against his better judgment, religion.

Meanwhile, back in London, Frederica has reluctantly accepted a job as the host of a new television talk show called "Through the Looking Glass," a wacky and cerebral kaffeeklatsch about the way "television is going to change everyone's consciousness." The first step in her preparation for the job is to buy a television and watch some of it. She's not impressed, but something intrigues her about the possibilities of this new medium. Soon she's appearing on the screen as "the Witch in the sugar cottage" talking about "Doris Lessing's idea of Free Women, George Eliot, and a Tupperware bowl." (Check your local listings.)

Unfortunately, just as she begins to find success and a bit of fame, her boyfriend moves back to Yorkshire to continue his work in advanced mathematics at the university. He's working with researchers who are studying the physiology of memory by observing snails. But he's also drawn inexorably to his mentally ill twin brother, who's a member of a therapy group that's metamorphosing into a religious cult.

Everyone's looking forward to the body-mind conference, including a group of radical students who have founded an antiuniversity outside the grounds of the old-style university on land owned by the religious cult where the biologists' well-observed snails live.

If you're still with me, you're probably thinking this is a pretty poor inventory of the story, but actually, it's something of a miracle that I could corral "A Whistling Woman" even into this unruly summary. The plot is so fragile that it breaks into tangents at the slightest touch of coherence.

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