Something for the Girls

THE ECHOING GROVE (373 pp.)--Rosamond Lehmann--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

A Nietzschean argument holds that an intelligent woman would prefer a 10% stake in a superior man to 100% ownership of an average one. By that test, Madeleine and Dinah, the English sisters and heroines of Rosamond Lehmann's The Echoing Grove, rate low I.Q.s. For they spend the better part of 20 years and 373 pages scrimmaging for a soggy, half-deflated male football named Rickie, and the rest trying to run with him toward the goal post of happiness. Since Rickie develops a debilitating ulcer and dies, neither of the girls makes it. But their tribulations are guaranteed to dampen any handkerchiefs that have dried out since the last episode of "John's Other Wife."

Madeleine is Rickie's wife. She is also a prim and proper neo-Victorian with a habit of regarding duty and pleasure as synonymous. Dinah is an apostle of self-expression, always dressing and undressing her mind to suit the latest intellectual fashion, from Picasso to Kierkegaard. "On visits and at her Bohemian parties, she makes an impression on Rickie. Pretty soon, Rickie's business engagements are mostly monkey business. Torn between his obligations to Madeleine and his two young sons, and the emotional release he feels with Dinah, Rickie's conscience and his stomach both begin hurting him.

Tragedy and exposure force his hand. Dinah gets pregnant and has a stillbirth. A poison-pen letter informs Madeleine of her husband's adulterous affair. Rickie promises not to see Dinah again, a promise he soon finds he cannot keep. When Madeleine turns down his halfhearted divorce plea, Rickie decides to run away with Dinah, but an attack of ulcers changes that plan. When he finally gets on his feet again. Dinah has drifted away from him, towards drink and the arms of another lover. Though she puts a "good face" on their patched-up marriage, Madeleine soon tosses her own moral halo in the dust for a clandestine affair with a young schoolmaster. Rickie's sudden death brings both sisters up short with the sense of mutual loss and mutual widowhood. Novel's end finds the aging sisters reconciled and cluck-clucking over the hard time they gave and got from poor Rickie.

Between long bouts of powder-room chitchat. The Echoing Grove commendably attempts to dig below the surface of life, but its well-manicured prose cuts into reality about as deeply as a nail file into California redwood.

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