A Good Man's Hard to Find

THE BEST OF HUSBANDS (343 pp.)--Alba de Cespedes--Macmillan ($3.75).

The theme of this novel seems to be that a good man is hard to find.

As an adolescent growing up in Rome, Alessandra Corteggiani wonders how her parents ever happened to marry. Her father is a boor who unfailingly pours the sour wine of shop talk at the evening meal. Her mother is an amateur pianist with an outlook on life as romantic and melancholy as a Chopin nocturne. When Sandra's mother falls in love with an effete aristocrat, Papa Corteggiani crushes her with a phrase or two, e.g., "All women are . . . sluts," and she drowns herself in the Tiber.

When it comes Sandra's turn to marry, she vows to do better; she picks a young university professor. To Sandra, Francesco is her mother's daydream come true: kind, imaginative, companionable and loving. She is sure that he will make the best of husbands.

In the eyes of the world, he does. But Sandra starts tasting the lees of her marriage almost before she sips its joys. The wedding night, which she has pictured as a ritual of tenderness, is reduced to a matter of crass urgency. "Afterward he didn't give me a loving look, call me his darling and his queen . . . He reached for the cigarettes." After she stretches his small monthly paycheck to the limit, he carps querulously: "Is it all gone so soon?"

Francesco never notices her, forgets their anniversaries, buries himself in his work. Time & again she tries to talk to him about the way they are drifting apart, but he shrugs it off with "Marriage is one of the oldest institutions." One early dawn, with patience and reason both gone, Sandra calls out, "Francesco! Help me, Francesco!" He grunts drowsily. "Go to sleep. Go to sleep. We'll talk tomorrow." But for Francesco, tomorrow never comes. Sandra empties a loaded revolver into his back.

Italian-born Alba de Cespedes, whose Cuban grandfather was the first President and liberator of Cuba, has a sharp eye for the kind of gritty marital incidents that set a man & wife's teeth on edge. In piling most of the evidence and all of the sympathv on her heroine's side, she writes like a shrewd attorney for the plaintiff, but reads, finally, like a somewhat shallow judge of human relations.

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