In Stendhal's Shadow

THE FANCY DRESS PARTY (299 pp.)--Alberto Moravia -- Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

Italian Novelist Alberto Moravia is a virtuoso who makes each of his books an experiment in a different literary manner. In The Woman of Rome, it was gritty realism; in The Conformist, political allegory; in Conjugal Love, a fine-threaded analysis of human passion. An earlier Moravia novel now published in the U.S. for the first time, The Fancy Dress Party, shows him in still another manner; it seems a deliberate attempt to recreate that gay mixture of political satire and opera bouffe which make Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma a masterpiece.

The Fancy Dress Party is set in "a certain country on the other side of the ocean," but in its brutal swagger and decadent morals it clearly recalls Mussolini's Italy. General Tereso Arango, its aging and bilious dictator, has always been fearless in battle and seldom troubled by scruples in handling political enemies. He has only one touch of frailty: let a lovely woman flutter her lashes and he caves in like a moonstruck schoolboy.

When Tereso hears that Fausta, a luscious widow with the face of a boy and the soul of a strumpet, will attend a fancy dress party, he decides that he too will go. This decision of state sets off a barrage of complications. Tereso's chief of police, worried that he may lose his post because his harsh methods are no longer needed in the thoroughly subdued country, decides to stage and then dramatically crush a phony attempt on the dictator's life. The "assassination" is to be undertaken by Perro, a police spy with a passion for intrigue, and Saverio, a bumbling idealist who dreams of Utopia and imagines Perro to be an agent of a secret revolutionary committee.

In a sequence that recalls one of Shakespeare's low-comedy passages, Perro and Saverio hire out as servants for the party. There follows a lively mixup--servant shenanigans, romantic horseplay, boudoir burlesque--dampened only by a final scene which ends in tragedy.

As opera bouffe, the novel is first-rate. Tereso swaggers in appropriate blockhead style; Fausta's romances, high & low, are drawn with Moravia's usual skill for capturing the flavors of sensuality; Perro is a neat reincarnation of the Machiavellian villain. As satire, the book fails. The true satirist's fierce involvement seems to be missing. Stendhal, despite his air of urbane weariness, kept scoring points against Bourbonism. Moravia seems to write from no particular point of view at all.

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