BOOK REVIEW : A Novel of Women Triumph, Revenge and Comradeship : WAITING TO EXHALE, <i> by Terry McMillan,</i> Viking, $19.95; 409 pages

It’s inappropriate to compare Terry McMillan’s third novel, “Waiting to Exhale,” to the works of other contemporary black women writers, like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Bebe Moore Campbell. This work isn’t lofty, luminous or particularly “brilliant.”

It also isn’t right to stick McMillan in a box with elegant black guy writers, like charming Charles Johnson or grouchy Ishmael Reed. McMillan’s new work is part of another genre entirely, so new it doesn’t really have a name yet. This genre has to do with women, triumph, revenge, comradeship.

McMillan’s immediate literary predecessor is, oddly enough, Olivia Goldsmith, who, last March, gave us “The First Wives Club.” There, four (white) women, having been dumped by their brutal, insolent, materialistic husbands, banded together and found justice--not by ruining their husbands, who weren’t worth the effort, but by learning to live well on their own terms; to become, like that legendary lady in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” their own women, well at ease.

McMillan sets up four middle-class black women, living in the highly symbolic town of Phoenix (because all of them will rise up, glorious, from the ashes of their present lives). This quartet is not oppressed greatly--or at all--by the problem of race. “White folks” wander around the periphery of this story like sad, soft, wiggly worms.

McMillan’s plucky females are beleaguered, put upon, bugged, by black men--their misdeeds, their absences, their lies, their treachery. It’s a tough life for a smart, pretty black woman. Maybe the only way to fight the system-as-it-exists is to unite to conquer.

These women are all about 36. They can’t count on easygoing youthful good looks anymore. Savannah has just moved to Phoenix and has a good job on cable TV. She helps support her welfare mom and is the “responsible” one in her family. But for all her bravery and good looks, Savannah can’t find a decent man (although she goes on several “hell dates” that have the horrid ring of truth).

Bernardine is married to a “buppie” with the soul of a salamander. He announces one day that he’s leaving her and generously offers her the house and a $300,000 settlement. He’s worth $2 million, but who’s counting? This low-life slime (who eventually marries his white secretary, the ultimate trophy wife), is counting on his first wife’s ignorance in financial matters.

Robin is into astrology, is as dumb as a plank and has an uncanny predilection for picking the foulest black men in Christendom to be her lovers. They steal from her, use her body, get married to other women and do dangerous drugs. The only nice guy she goes out with, she finds sexually repellent.

Finally, Gloria, although the same age as the others, has chosen a different path. She weighs in at more than 200 pounds, has a teen-age son named Tarik, has been a single mother all her life, runs a beauty shop and is ready to perish from high blood pressure and terrible loneliness.

Savannah needs a decent man. Bernardine needs to nail her no-count husband and drop a pesky pill problem she’s picked up along the way. Robin needs to get a clue before she gets killed or picks up an awful disease. And Gloria needs a new life.

In a series of engaging chapters, McMillan shows us these women alone and together--attending social events that don’t pan out; going to bars where they aren’t the center of attention; venturing to a meeting of a club, Black Women on the Move, where, haltingly, some sort of societal net is getting put together.

These women help each other, cheer each other up, turn nightmare nights into daytime laughs. “Waiting to Exhale” has been marked to be a commercial success and it should be (it debuted June 7 at No. 5 on the bestseller list). Like “The First Wives Club,” it is a paean to the sisterhood of all women and should put the fear of God into any husband squirreling money away in numbered Swiss accounts against his upcoming divorce. They’re on to you now, guys. So don’t even think about it!