BOOK REVIEW : Impersonations of Love and Romance : THE IMPERSONATOR <i> by Diana Hammond</i> , Doubleday $20; 357 pages

It’s hard to say what makes this novel so wonderful. “The Impersonator” is like a light, very expensive cologne. It takes daily life and shadows it with delicious scent. You can’t get enough of it.

Everything you see here is fairly recognizable, but the atmosphere is tantalizing and exotic. Love and adventure lie just ahead of us and just behind us.

Jane Donovan, a travel writer who comes from a good family and has lots of integrity, sails down the Nile, doing a series on great rivers of the world. She meets an elegant pop scholar named Roberto Elias de Pena. They fall in love and quickly marry.

Jane has already been burned once--she caught her first husband in a spur-of-the-moment infidelity, and dumped him like the trash he was. Jane, the author tells us, is “true.” She despises betrayal, fooling around, shoddiness of spirit. (Her two brothers, Hal and Jerry, also carry this family trait. Jerry is a dedicated priest. Hal, a man of the material world, assists a U.S. senator. Hal likes his wife, his kids, his country. He’s “true” too.)

Roberto is the widower of a famous American celebrity who died under mysterious circumstances. His first wife, Theo Buckley, was a stunning beauty and fearless social satirist, a kind of cross between Julia Roberts and Lily Tomlin. And once Roberto and Jane-the-true get back to New York and settle down, they visit an obscure nightclub where someone is impersonating the late, great Theo Buckley, down to a hair-raising T. Jane is shaken badly; Roberto falls in love all over again with this vivacious shadow of his dead wife.

Then we meet this impersonator--every woman’s nightmare, every woman’s dream. Beau is beautiful, languid, romantic, a “perfect lover,” but he can’t seem to get up off the couch. He reclines all day. He does nothing. He watches TV. He’s stupid as pudding. He’s terrified of everything. He won’t work.

He lives with an actress/waitress who has lost her youth and looks supporting him. He’s got this one act he can do--impersonate Theo Buckley--but he quits that after three weeks and begins an affair with Roberto, who lavishes money on him, overlooking the petty inconvenience that this impersonator of his beloved dead wife is a man.

This is just the very beginning. This love story-thriller bristles with issues. What is love anyway? How is it that Beau can make so many smart women (and men) fall in love with him? Where did he come from? What is it he wants?

Beau moves from character to character in swirls. Pretty soon he’s enchanted everybody in his immediate world. Flash forward 200 pages, and Beau, a guy again, has captured Jane .

Jane is “true,” so she’s outraged when brother Hal comes moseying around with the hideous suggestion that Beau, her third great love, has also known the dead-and-famous Theo Buckley very intimately indeed and may have been involved with her untimely death. All this is far more complex than any review can suggest.

The impersonator himself suffers greatly and demands our sympathy. The effort to join fantasy and love with daily life, the terrible suffering of a lonely life and even the nature of culture--all these aspects of our existence are closely examined here. Toward the end of the novel we’re given a demonstration of another kind of “love”--deeds instead of gestures--that works beautifully within the plot.

I hated so much for this book to end that I skipped back in the middle to prolong the experience. I guess you could say I loved “The Impersonator” and was thrilled by it, which was just the effect the author must have wanted.