The Nurses By Richard Frede (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95; 498 pp.)

Beneath the rape, the strike and the neurotic celebrity patients, there is a more than decent novel in here, somewhere. Not great literature, certainly, but Richard Frede’s ability to describe both the hospital work and the people doing it is remarkably on target. He did his medical homework carefully and well. The situations are real, accurate and dramatic. Technical expertise, patient care procedures, compassion, frustration, exhaustion and satisfaction are all here. But the reader has the feeling that the writer must have felt nursing was not especially interesting or feared his audience wouldn’t. Almost every nurse in the book, and there are far too many characters, has a personal life to rival any soap opera. The nurses regularly work double shifts, 16 hours, yet have the time and sexual energy only associated with a street-corner profession. One of them even seduces the director of the hospital and at the end of her exercise is left with this thought: “All this power. Ours. We have so much power. . . “

All the good feelings are here, as well as the reality that nurses do not leave their patients when they leave work: “They had all crowded into her dreams and their shouting had awakened her. She could have screamed aloud but she could not permit that and so the scream stayed inside.”

Too bad Frede didn’t have enough respect for the people he wrote about to allow them to remain better-than-standard humans when they left the hospital, rather than turn them into soft-core porn starlets.