ONLY REVOLUTIONS. By Mark Z. Danielewski. 360 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.

Mark DanieleWski's publisher recommends you read his new book, "Only Revolutions" - it has been nominated for a National Book Award - in incremental bursts. The idea is that, if you turn the book upside down and swing it around every eight pages, you can alternate the monologues of its two narrators, Sam and Hailey, so as to spin them together.

Should this idea be trusted? Pantheon, after all, also insists the book is a novel, and that's quite a stretch. If we are to call "Only Revolutions" a novel, then we must, at the very least, call it a road novel in which the road (one of those numbered routes from an old, weird folk song) is a M-Vbius strip.

Danielewski's book would be better described as an epic tone poem, a cult object in search of a cult, an experiment gone perfectly mad or a sacrifice to the Ouroboros - the circular serpent symbolic of eternity, a snake eating its own tail. Further, to hijack Mary McCarthy's line about Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire," it is an infernal machine, a do-it-yourself kit ... and a trap to catch reviewers. This reviewer first felt trapped, then skinned.