Bestseller Revisited

THE DINNER PARTY (236 pp.)--Gretch-en Finletter--Harper ($3).

Like the edge of a locust swarm, the frontier of Commuterland advances, driving the farmers before it and leaving deposits of white colonial mansions and wrought-iron signs upon the green, tumbled land. But just ahead of the chirking mass, beyond the last bounds of a commuter's endurance, past the Levittowns and past Newyorkerland with its split-level houses and split-personality admen and Wall Streeters, lies the land of Dinner Party. It is rich farmland which no one farms, populated by Men who have Made their Mark and their families. Their wives scorn elegance in favor of unobtrusive Rightness, are kindly amused by the Locals, find butlers ostentatious and profess a terror of intellectuals. In their houses, their clothes and their mores, they achieve enormous comfort, spending a lot of money wherever it does not show.

In The Dinner Party, this leisurely, secure world is chronicled with grace and unobtrusive humor by a practicing resident. Gretchen Finletter's credentials: she is a descendant of James G. Elaine, a daughter of famed Conductor Walter Damrosch, the wife of lawyer and onetime Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter of Manhattan and Bar Harbor, Me. Her heroine is terrified by the very fashionable and the very bright, but Author Finletter is both bright and fashionable. She has written a scattering of plays, and a book of memoirs. Once, for a charity show, she wrote a play called A Night in the Palace of Prince Esterhazy, with a cast that included Grace Moore, Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. Angier Biddle Duke, Cecil Beaton, Prince Serge Obolensky. and Papa Damrosch himself.

Dinner Party's leading character might just hold her own with an Obolensky, but would feel that she had nothing really adequate to say to an Astor or really adequate to wear for a Beaton. She is more likely to turn up in a creation of three seasons ago, with a not-too-notice able grass stain on the skirt. The Dinner Party, written in diary form, records the daily round of a family just moved from the city while husband Charles writes a book. The diarist-heroine achieves an art less air and a malicious ear for the over tones that lurk in unguarded speech.

Through a long summer she copes with daughters, coddles temperamental Roza the cook, and Toona the city-bred maid, who remarks ominously that "the country is awfully quiet." She gets distractedly involved in the church fair and in the problem of finding an extra man for a "little dinner" ("Charles says . . . he will attend to it. Am stunned with gratitude and surprise").

She tries to play Democratic politics (Charles, of course, is a Republican) and daydreams about being an important and witty Power behind some great man's throne. She is at her most gallant and most futile in trying, while having her hair trimmed, to talk her college-age daughter out of an unsuitable attachment: "Time is running out so move in a little faster. Tell her I am so very fond of Bowie. Linda responds, Yes, he certainly can charm the birds off the trees. I go on and say, Of course you have so much to offer, dear. Linda asks, How do you mean? I then lose my head, jump the gun, and cry, All I want is your happiness, and my eyes fill with tears. Linda throws down her scissors and exclaims, Mummie! Are you trying to have A Little Talk?"

Watching airmen on parade at a nearby base, The Dinner Party's hostess is seized by a sudden feeling of inadequacy. "I sit there facing the plain truth that I just do not count." Perhaps not. But for that idle time, before Charles comes down for cocktails, Dinner Party is charming chatter, with just a lemon-twist of real wit. It is the kind of book a woman likes because it is So True, and may even beguile an idle husband. The time it takes passes pleasantly, and there is always (twice a day on the branch line) a train back to the outer world.

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