A Catalogue of Violence Against Women : MERCY, <i> by Andrea Dworkin,</i> Four Walls Eight Windows, $19.95, 345 pages

“I wasn’t raped until I was almost 10, which is pretty good it seems when I ask around because many have been touched but are afraid to say.”

This is the beginning of the story from age 10 to 27 of a woman named Andrea, born in 1946 in Camden, N.J. Andrea is a character in a work of fiction by a prominent American feminist also named Andrea, also born in 1946 in Camden. The two of them are women who are not afraid “to say.” To say almost anything.

It was awful, Andrea the fictional character says. From age 10 on, awful men did awful things to her. At 18, she finally found a tender boyfriend. Then the boyfriend’s roommate raped her while the boyfriend was with his dying sister.

At 26, Andrea was befriended by a famous artist whose work she admired, and he raped her. A male friend saved her from another rape. Then he said, “You owe me,” and raped her.

She was kept from complete isolation and misery by her affectionate female German shepherd, and some guy came along and, after permanently damaging her larynx by violent oral sex, stole the dog.

“Mercy” is less a story than a catalogue of sexual attacks. (In her nonfiction book, “Intercourse,” Dworkin argued that the penis is a weapon and that every act of heterosexual intercourse is an attack.) The people are scarcely more than bodies--Andrea, the victim, and almost every male, a rapist. All that dawns on Andrea is that she and other women should kill the men who caused them pain.

The novel, which repeats some of the same violent sexual incidents Dworkin included in her first novel, “Ice and Fire,” is essentially pornography. This is noteworthy because Dworkin is best known as a crusader for the abolition of pornography. She proposed a civil rights ordinance defining pornography as a form of sexual discrimination. The law, passed by the Minneapolis City Council but vetoed by the mayor, would have allowed women to sue to censor hard-core books and movies.

In “Mercy,” Andrea tells of suffering that a woman can never get over. Her suffering, she explains, was of religious proportions: Jesus had it easy; “It’s the cross for ladies, a bed, and you don’t get to die.”

“Mercy’s” unworked blast of anguish tells a lot about what makes a novel a novel. Similar anguish is often chronicled in fiction by Marge Piercy, to name one very effective feminist writer. Piercy, whose writing is often intentionally raw and rough, can shape a story that makes you unable to turn away. You turn the page because you care what happens next.

Turn the pages of “Mercy” and you get the equivalent of a slap in the face. Dworkin believes only violent language can communicate violent events; the ironic effect of violent language numbingly repeated, however, is to make the reader say: “What happens to this character doesn’t matter.”

The author’s contempt for the reasonable or artful spokeswoman is communicated in the prologue and epilogue that frame Andrea’s story. These are spoken by a woman academic identified only as “Not Andrea.” The author’s irony clumps along: “It is of course, tiresome to dwell on sexual abuse,” says Not Andrea.

It isn’t, of course, tiresome to dwell on sexual abuse, any more than it is tiresome to dwell on war. It depends on how it’s written. But it is extremely difficult to describe nearly unendurable pain without having your reader turn away.

Andrea tells us that she finds Holocaust literature insufficient. “It’s almost funny,” she says. “The person’s trying so hard to be calm and rational, controlled, clear, not to exaggerate, never to exaggerate, to remember ordinary details so that the story will have a narrative line that will make sense. . . .”

Andrea may be right that no amount of clarity and precision can describe pain. But more people would read “Mercy” past the first three pages if it had more clarity and precision. And if you believe the Holocaust and other horrors can’t be described in words, perhaps you have no business writing and publishing a book.

If “Mercy” has value, it is not as fiction, but as an event. Dworkin’s book doesn’t want to teach or touch or entertain. It wants to kick out a window. Someone will come along later, someone mercifully skilled and subtle, and the existence of “Mercy” may free her--or him--to write honestly about rape.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “The Devil Soldier” by Caleb Carr (Atlantic Monthly Press).