BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Sets, Cast and Dramatic Script Get Played Out in the Mind : IN THE PALACE OF THE MOVIE KING <i> by Hortense Calisher</i> ; Random House, $25, 426 pages

“Show, don’t tell,” goes the novelist’s credo. Not easy to do if the novel is about a genius--for instance, a world-class filmmaker. A writer of potboilers can simply say the hero is a genius, describe his cars and clothes and fawning underlings, his love affairs and box-office grosses, but to show genius in action--that’s a much more arduous task.

Doubly so if, as Hortense Calisher does, you disdain to show your “movie king,” Paul Gonchev, actually making a movie. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in “The Last Tycoon,” walked Monroe Stahr through a producer’s typical day, giving him plenty of opportunities to display his acumen. Gonchev, however, is kept on the run by so many seriocomic events--although these are rendered in the literary equivalent of slow motion--that his only passport into the ranks of genius is his sensibility.

But what a sensibility it is! Calisher (“The False Entry,” “New Yorkers”) doesn’t even bother to spend much time having Gonchev direct imaginary movies. The proof of his gift is simply the quality of his eye, his way of seeing everything and everybody he encounters--much as Gulley Jimson, the painter in Joyce Cary’s “The Horse’s Mouth,” experienced the world as a rainbow stippling of brush strokes.

Gonchev’s world is wider than Jimson’s. Born to an emigrant Russian family, he has grown up in Japan and worked for 16 years in Albania (which forbids its people to travel except vicariously to the foreign cities that Gonchev is allowed to duplicate in an elaborate complex of film sets). Then he is rescued or kidnaped--he has mixed feelings about it--and brought to the United States, where he is paraded on the college lecture circuit as a dissident.

At first we may think that Gonchev’s “palace” is this collection of sets, built on a remote plateau in the Balkans and dubbed Elsinore (not after Hamlet’s castle, as his fans think, but after the Southern California movie town). Or the estate where he and his actress wife, Vuksica, live in Albania. Or some of the fancy digs where he is lodged in the States. But the palace is really Gonchev’s mind--a supremely worldly mind, loyal to no country but adaptable to any, in which elements of Europe, Asia and America are continuously jostling.

The interior drama of Calisher’s novel is a subtle one. Can Gonchev, who has produced art and lived passably well under the pressures of a totalitarian society, function in the chaotic vacuum of a free one? How can he put the pieces of himself together--or should he? Is he hopelessly behind the times--or, because of his very detachment, his rootlessness, ahead of them?

The exterior drama, in contrast, is full of action, conspiracy and farce. Gonchev, knocked out during his abduction, suffers a concussion that temporarily reduces him to only one of his languages: Japanese. His translator, Roko (who is not Japanese but Korean), becomes his lover. Back home, the wily Vuksica and her twin brother, Danilo, twice swap identities so that she too may escape. A mother shoots her son. In Orange County, during a quake, another Russian emigre is swallowed alive by a crack in the earth.

Calisher combines these dramas in a way that is both originally hers and traditionally literary, the antithesis of film. For such a long novel, “In the Palace of the Movie King” has only a few scenes. Each bulges with the mind stuff that novels specialize in--memories; flashbacks; conversations with the dead; speculations on artistic, political and sexual boundaries--and dialogue that is often funny but sometimes as elliptical as Henry James’.

The advantage of this method: Every scene has a payoff. The disadvantage: We have to wait a long time for it.

Is the waiting worthwhile? On balance, yes, thanks to the finesse of Calisher’s language, the tension she is able to maintain between satire and genuine feeling, the robustness of her characters and the buoyant spirit of her hero, who refuses to be used by America--”You grow fat on dissidence from far away”--but embraces his bewildering, polyglot new country as a place where a filmmaker can “record wherever one is, while standing by the river of flux.”