BOOK REVIEW : Behind Closed Doors of Arab Households : WOMAN OF SAND AND MYRRH;<i> by Hanan al-Shaykh translated by Catherine Cobham</i> ; Anchor Books/Doubleday $9, paper; 217 pages

Western novelists have found meaning for hundreds of years in domesticity and boredom. In the Arab world, where the novel is still relatively young, daily concerns may figure prominently, but the rotting politics of post-colonialism often have a stronger odor.

Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh--raised in Beirut, educated in Cairo, living in London--is a hybrid: Her themes are those of the British household drama (she’s been compared to Margaret Drabble), but even domestic tedium becomes exotic in her work because so little is known about the daily routine of the house-bound Arab woman.

“Women of Sand and Myrrh,” her first book published in the United States, is about what goes on behind the closed doors--especially bedroom doors--of a high-end, poorly planned urban community in the middle of the desert of an unnamed oil-rich country.

Her three Arab protagonists, confined to their air-conditioned houses, are disaffected and stir-crazy. On the rare occasions when they go out into the inhuman heat, swathed in abayas and black veils, they are greeted with the odors of germicide, sewers and chemical waste. A fourth woman, Suzanne, a chubby, blond, relocated Texas housewife, can’t get enough of the desert. She spends her time collecting Arab lovers.

Suha, 25, is a Lebanese emigre with a college degree and an aesthetic disgust for the desert town. “Like every woman coming here, I felt that this was time lost out of my life,” she tells herself. “Everyday life existed in the desert, but it was the daily routine of housewives and didn’t go beyond . . . the neighbor who only half-opened her door because she had wax on her thighs, fortune-telling in coffee grounds, food on the stove and gossip and knitting and babies’ nappies.”

She gets a job in a department store but has to hide in a cardboard box when the security patrols come around looking for women and pork products. “When are we going to leave this country?” she constantly wonders; she asks her husband, Basam: “Don’t you have the feeling that life here isn’t normal?”

We never learn much about Basam--only that he pays Suha insufficient attention. When her boredom grows insufferable, she has an affair with a miserable woman named Nur, a fatuous, pill-popping lover of pop culture. Nur has money, a lavish wardrobe, a “soft desert accent” and a knack for love affairs.

“My love is from a tribe in the heart of the desert. Her forefathers suffered in the heat and the thirst,” writes one of Nur’s lovers, a milquetoast rock singer moved to song after trying on one of her designer dresses in a foreign hotel room.

Tamr is the sanest presence in “Sand and Myrrh.” A desert native, she is also al-Shaykh’s most successful voice. First married at 12, twice-divorced and now living back at home, she wages a hunger strike so that her family will let her study at the local Gulf Institute for Women and Girls.

The fast is one of the book’s few significant actions, and it succeeds almost instantly. She enrolls, studies and opens a beauty salon--no mean feat in this desert. The response of an aunt to the shop’s promising first few months: “Congratulations, Tamr, and God willing we’ll be able to congratulate you on finding a new husband before long.”

Unlikely segues and images are among al-Shaykh’s strengths; another is her language, rendered by translator Catherine Cobham as a compulsive, disembodied impressionism steeped in sarcasm, satire and sex. (Al-Shaykh’s first novel, “The Story of Sahra,” an explicit Bildungsroman set against the Lebanese war, was banned in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.)

As her incongruities pile up, however, one occasionally grows impatient with the book’s randomness. Its separate litanies of unrelieved unhappiness--a device presumably intended to reinforce the walled-off houses and alienation that separate one person from another in this unfriendly world--sometimes make us feel as though we are in a small box, surrounded by infinity.

Some characterizations and symbols also lack subtlety. Servants and drivers tend to be enigmatic homosexuals or irrepressible motor-mouths uttering religious aphorisms; workers come in hordes, “swarming” around grim building sites; women, too often, are caged birds (Suha carries along her canary when, at the book’s end, she finally departs for Beirut).

Perhaps characterization and subtlety are less important, however, in “social critique” novels such as this than the world that is conveyed and criticized.