Family of Ciphers

RED PLUSH (615 pp.)--Guy McCrone--Farrar, Straus ($3.50).

This languid family novel will presumably be read in December by hundreds of thousands of Americans: it has been graced by the Book-of-the-Month Club stamp of approval. Otherwise, this long, tedious triple-decker would probably be doomed to wither on the vines of suburban circulating libraries.

Set in the Victorian Age, Red Plush is one of those placid novels that wallow in family trivia, delight in minor, certain-to-be-resolved family crises and snicker at family eccentrics. The family is accorded an existence of its own, dominating and dwarfing the individual characters; it becomes a sort of metaphysical entity, unexplored and uncriticized, that remains firm and true, regardless of the peccadilloes of its members. The reader is therefore seldom aroused about the fate of any individual Moorhouse. For even if erratic David were to choose the wrong bride (though he does not) or if moody Phoebe were to persist in her cold antagonism towards her errant husband (she comes around), the Moorhouse family would muddle through.

Red Plush records the gradual social ascent of the muttony Moorhouses during the Victorian Era: their little intrigues, their innumerable dinners and tea parties, their meandering, witless conversations and their damp love affairs. (Like all good bourgeois, the Moorhouses reject the wild delights of love for the solid comforts of money and status.)

What is exasperating about all this is that the novel so gapingly succumbs to the pompous middle-class standards of its own characters. Inflated Bel, a meddling woman busily climbing the social ladder; dough-mouthed Mungo and his horsy noble-blooded bride; rattle-brained David unable to decide between love and honor--these ciphers are fondled by Scottish Author McCrone as if they were creatures whose experience had intrinsic significance and value.

There is an honorable tradition of family novels in English literature, but McCrone is sadly unable to muster any of the gentle, needling satire of Jane Austen or the fierce jaundice of Samuel Butler or the sensitivity to social change of John Galsworthy. Red Plush reads as if it were written by a Moorhouse himself.

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